Yi-Ban
London Regatta Centre, Dockside Road, Royal Albert Dock, London E16
Tel: 020 7473 6699
Price: Meal for two £30-£50
I have found the perfect restaurant for six-year-old boys. The problem is, I'm not sure I can recommend it enthusiastically to the big people who would need to accompany them. This surprised me, because I had received lots of hearty endorsements for Yi-Ban, a Chinese place in London's Docklands, and had assumed it was a banker. Then again, having been there, I now suspect that part of its good word of mouth comes directly from the difficulty in getting there. If reaching your meal demands a herculean effort, perhaps you would be less likely to be down on what you eat at the end of it for fear of feeling stupid for having gone to all that trouble in the first place.
Granted, there are no mountain passes en route to Yi-Ban, but eating there still requires commitment. The restaurant is on the very outer edges of the Docklands Light Railway network, way beyond where it says 'Here be dragons' on the map and just before where the Thames tumbles off the edge of the world. On and on we trundled, my companion and I, our train taking a long, looping journey around the Millennium Dome. We went past shiny office blocks and broken-down factories which are yet to be knocked down to make way for more shiny office blocks, and some wasteland, and the place where the hobbits live, until, somewhere beyond the gargantuan ExCeL exhibition centre, we sighted from the train window an isolated grey building at the water's edge bearing a banner with the restaurant's name.
We doubled back on foot from Royal Albert Station along the river walk, the wind howling at us over the cruel tundra of the Thames Gateway, towards our lunch. Yi-Ban is situated on the first floor of the London Regatta Centre, a facility for big people with long arms who do things with paddles. The waters of the former Royal Albert Dock on which it sits now provide a full-on rowing course. Downstairs is a serious gym full of dangerous-looking equipment being manipulated by dangerous-looking men. Upstairs is the restaurant, with glass walls that look out - and this is what will thrill any right-minded six-year-old - directly over London City Airport.
The view from the spartan, utilitarian dining room is completely uninterrupted; from almost any table you can watch the planes land and take off, some of them propeller-driven, others small jets, all of them just a short distance away over the water. Towards the end of our lunch they even drove a fire engine down to the far end of the runway so it could test its water cannons. I know small boys who would spontaneously wet themselves with pleasure at such a sight. (I advise regular toilet breaks.)
The kicker should, of course, be: and hey, the food's wonderful, too. But on the day we went, I'm afraid it wasn't.
Let's start with the positives. The menu reads well, with lots of the wobbly offally things which indicate a proper Chinese restaurant serving a hardcore Chinese clientele who want the good stuff. (And indeed, most of the clientele on a weekday lunchtime was Chinese.) Think duck tongues and beef giblets, think pork with salted fish and three ways with chicken claws. Personally, I won't do chicken claws ever again (all that jellified cartilage, all those knobbly knuckles) but I do like to see them on the menu.
The dim sum here, served daily from noon to 5pm, are cheap at between £2 and £3.50 a dish. Of those we tried, it was the steamed variety that pleased most, particularly the crystal scallop and the snow-pea dumplings, which had the necessary fresh, crisp bite beneath the soft white outer casing. And we did like the flavour of the pork puffs, with their flaky, glazed puff-pastry shell. But we would have liked them a whole lot more if they hadn't been served cool.
Deep-fried squid cake should be succulent and full of the spring of fresh seafood. These were greasy and chewy. Bitter melon with a bolus of rehydrated dried scallop was better, in a clumsy sort of way, but hardly a match for what the best places can do. It being a cold winter's day, we had also ordered some soups to start, a hot and sour and a won ton. Both lacked depth of flavour. They were insipid, pale shadows of their best selves.
We were so disappointed by all this, so downhearted, that we ordered that shell-suited chav of the Cantonese menu, crispy chilli beef. And lo, it was the best thing we tried: delicate shreds of beef that crunched on impact, a punchy sweet and savoury dark sauce and burst of chilli heat at the end.
So the solution may be to avoid the dim sum altogether and go for the Cantonese staples. Better still, regard this as an excellent plane-spotting trip, with a serviceable eating opportunity attached. And if it rises above that, you will be pleasantly surprised.
