Despite my fetishistic pursuit of the new, there are some areas of restaurant-going where I am prone to conservatism. Dim sum is one of them. I expect to eat it in a room full of the inelegant fizz and clatter of food being chucked on to tables, with my elbows pinned in against my sides as though I am some hapless veal cow being fattened up. I expect the waiters to sneer at me as they splatter me with hot sauce. I expect to suffer for my lunch. I think I expect this because dim sum is such an outrageous indulgence. Those moreish little dishes of fried and steamed dumplings are only ever lunchtime food - and snack food at that. There seems something so terribly wrong about such pleasure, so casually taken. Thus, to make me feel better about it, I demand the equivalent of a good spanking from the surroundings, the service and, if they're up to it, the waiters.
I was, therefore, deeply suspicious of Hakkasan, a smart new Chinese restaurant situated at the end of an alley off London's Tottenham Court Road, which was probably once a very good place for a mugging. The enterprise belongs to Alan Yau, the man behind the Japanese noodle chain Wagamama. Hakkasan is the portrait in Wagamama's attic, in reverse: where the latter was all cold white minimalist lines and utilitarian service, the new place is all plush and lacquerwork.
There are giant carved wooden screens dividing up the basement space, and low, swaying lamps that drop rich pools of lights on to tables. The walls of what was once an underground car park are now solidly encased in a green-grey slate the colour of a stormy sea. It makes the restaurant look like a cross between an opium den and a high-class Tokyo brothel. Not that I've been to an awful lot of either, but you get the idea. Here, you can expect to be soothed rather than spanked.
I did not think it promised good dim sum, which they serve only at lunchtimes. Their evening menu, which I have not tried, is hellishly expensive for Chinese food. It is £60-a-head territory and includes shark's fin soup at £38 a go. This price bothers me hugely. If the dish costs so much, the ingredients must be expensive. If the ingredients are expensive, they must be rare. If they are rare, surely we shouldn't be eating them? Good dim sum, on the other hand, should be cheap and prepared with the sensibility of the cook rather than the chef. Either they were going to come up with some horribly 're-imagined' version of dim sum, or they would need to have two kitchens working inside one.
They've gone for the latter, by the simple expedient of having two different teams in the kitchen. I am not claiming theirs is the cheapest dim sum in London, because clearly it is not. But nor is it hideously expensive. What's more, the surroundings are hugely sexy, the service is attentive (if, at times, a little overly so) and the dishes themselves are generally very good. My companion was my friend Rob, a willing tool of the state - or government press officer, as he prefers to describe himself. With bugger all else to do while the election was ongoing, he agreed to help me road-test the menu.
Most of the basics are priced at around £3.50 for three pieces. Baked venison puffs were deliciously buttery triangles of glazed puff pastry filled with a sweet and salty meat sauce. Fried taro croquettes delivered one of the stars of the meal: a crisp pastry packet with the texture you might associate with deep-fried moss, filled with scallops and sweetcorn.
Steamed char-sui buns were perfect: pillow soft without and sweet and unctuous within. In Chinatown, they would have been impressed. The sauce, with very serviceable poached Peking dumplings, was sharp and aromatic with coriander. Steamed sticky rice in lotus leaf, with wind-dried pork and salted duck egg yolk, was a clever piece of work. And yet, for all the Chinese cooking skills that had gone into it, the rice tasted mostly of bacon and eggs. Interesting, but odd. The only duff note was lobster congee with ginger - not because it was bad but simply because I didn't know that congee is a watery rice porridge with the consistency of snot. I do know now, and I also know that I don't like it. Pak choi in oyster sauce was light and fresh and the stir-fried, hand-pulled noodles were soft and silky.
Puddings have never been a major feature of Chinese food and nothing about the dessert menu here convinces me otherwise. Rob took one look at the list and, when I told him to choose one, said: 'Do I have to?' He eventually went for the plum-wine jelly and lychee sorbet. It was a sweet glassful and a real palate cleanser, but nothing much beyond that. Similarly, pineapple spring rolls with a ginger-infused cream were no more than fine.
These felt like puddings designed to fill a gap on the menu identified only by a restaurant consultant. Because what is most striking about Hakkasan (at lunchtime) is that while the style of service and the design tries to break away from the clichés of the Chinese eatery, the food does not. What we ate were classics very well executed. I can not escape the feeling that the dim sum is really just a way to keep the cash flowing through what must be a hellishly expensive enterprise until the sun goes down and the fat wallets turn up. No matter: the end result is a great place for dim sum where the waiters don't shout at you. That alone makes it worth trying.
