Cha Cha Moon 5/10
Telephone 020 7297 9800
Address 15-21 Ganton Street, London W1
Open: All week, noon-11pm (11.30 Fri & Sat; 10pm Sun)
If you want to know who your friends are, take them to Cha Cha Moon. This latest venture from Alan Yau may pass every technical requirement to qualify as a restaurant, but really it is a mingling of prison canteen and torture chamber.
Some of you will, of course, like it more than this vile old curmudgeon did, but I suspect that being aged between 17-23 is a prerequisite for active enjoyment of the deal on offer here, which is as follows: in return for large helpings of unconscionably cheap, noodle-dominated Chinese food, be prepared to endure 1) a wait for a table that's twice as long as you can possibly hope to spend at that table; 2) the worst acoustics in human history; 3) a dining area redolent of a medium-security prison in one of Amnesty's least favourite south-east Asian countries; and 4) tacit but relentless chivvying to depart said table, which begins, novelly enough, even before you sit down.
"I am so, so sorry - I don't know what to say," I said to what I assumed was our former friend as we were handed menus some 15 minutes into our half-hour crawl along a gloomy corridor.
"Don't be silly," she replied with every indication of sincerity. "This is great."
I looked into my wife's eyes, and she into mine, and all four filled with tears. Our friend should have feigned illness and whipped her 11-year-old daughter off for a pizza. But she was staying, this queen of the Dunkirk spirit, and making the best of it.
A quarter-hour later, what we found at the end of that queue was an operation targeted at 20-year-old Scandinavian students and that subspecies of aggressive cyclist who likes posing in public with a novel by Milan Kundera. In the old days, such poseurs were drawn to Wagamama, the noodle chain at which Yau made his name before opening such swanky and determinedly underlit trend hound-magnets as Hakkasan and Yauatcha with such brilliant success that now almost no one in the business can ape Harry Enfield's petit bourgeois Brummie by declaring, "I am considerably richer than Yau."
In the fearsome rigour of its utilitarianism, Cha Cha Moon seems as much semi-ironic paean to Wagamama as homage to the noodle bars on every street corner in Yau's native Hong Kong. "Sorry, we cannot modify," a waiter replied when we asked for a glass of orange juice, a substance featured in non-alcoholic cocktails. "We only order a certain number of oranges." (That response apart, this chap turned out to be very sweet, actually.)
Even so, with brickwork walls, refectory-style tables that must be shared, interrogation room hanging lamps and oppressively low, bamboo-encased ceilings, it's hard to escape the nagging sense that at any moment a couple of Khmer Rouge foot soldiers will storm through the place, screaming at you to put down the chopsticks and get back out to the rice fields.
At first, sitting beside the vast, open-plan kitchens, the sole pleasure was watching the chefs at work and apparently having an even worse time than we were. But once the fruits of their labours began to arrive - in some cases as long as 23 seconds after being ordered - things picked up a little.
Every single dish is priced at £3.50 at time of writing (this introductory offer will end soon, if not already), the servings are generous, and the food, which is mostly Chinese, but with Malay and Thai twists, ranges from the perfectly all right to the pretty good.
The basic quality of the various noodles was rather impressive, as was the clarity of chicken stock used for the soups. The acoustics are so atrocious, however, that I can't be sure what anyone else thought, though they all seemed to like the jasmine tea-smoked chicken lao mian, which was enlivened by crispy duck-style skin and exemplary "hand-pulled noodles" (can you go to too much trouble to relax a noodle?).
Seafood ho fun was pleasingly exotic for the money, with prawns, squid and a fat scallop atop thick, rice flour noodles, and although dan dan mian (shrimp and peanut) suffered a bit from the Milk of Magnesia cloudiness of the broth, and char siu mian from the fattiness of the barbecued pork, chilli prawn lao mian, with its lovely fat noodles, seemed another unusually lavish dish for 70 shillings. As for the jia xiang beef ho fun, the meat, which came in a mediocre black bean sauce, wasn't great, but the braised shiitake mushrooms were delicious. Prawn dumplings, Szechuan wontons and spring rolls, meanwhile, were competent renditions of old familiars.
The wine list is reduced to one white, one pink and one red, all of which are served in 250ml carafes, and while ordering another and lingering over it in lieu of the nonexistent puddings would have been an intriguing experiment, all five of us - 11-year-olds and codgers alike - found ourselves craving the tranquillity of the London Underground.
"Thank you so much," a practised liar insisted as we went our separate ways along the Piccadilly line. "That was such a lovely treat."
I looked at my wife, and she at me, and once again those tears of gratitude and love welled up.
The bill
Tea-smoked chicken lao mian £3.50
Seafood ho fun £3.50
Dan dan mian £3.50
Char siu mian £3.50
Chilli prawn lao mian £3.50
Jia xiang beef ho fun £3.50
Braised shiitake £3.50
Szechuan wonton £3.50
Spring roll £3.50
Prawn dumpling £3.50
3 carafes rosé £14.70
2 small bottles still water £3
2 non-alcoholic cocktails £5.80
Subtotal £58.50
Tip £10
Total £68.50
