Xi’an Biang Biang Noodles, 62 Wentworth Street, London E1 7AL (020 8617 1470). Small plates £4.80-£7.50, big plates £7.90-£11.20, wine from £16.50 a bottle
These are complex times for Britain’s Chinese restaurants. I know this because recently I sat on a panel about their future at Asia House in London. For the most part I was listening to my fellow panellists, Andy Kwok of the Good Earth group, and the uber-restaurateur Alan Yau, who set up Hakkasan, Yauatcha and Park Chinois among others. I contributed memories of the Chinese restaurants along Queensway in the early 1970s, where chefs stood in the windows pulling noodles as a kind of come-hither culinary theatre; they talked brutal economic and business realities.
On the one hand the opening up of China has resulted in a glorious flowering in the variety of Chinese food available in Britain’s cities. We have gone from the days of the orange and the sticky, a disfigured approximation of Cantonese food, to the fiery hit of Sichuan and Hunan, through to the soupy dumplings of Shanghai and the cumin-crusted meat skewers and ribbon noodles of northern China. If you’re a bit handy with a pair of chopsticks these are great times to be alive.
That is the frothy excitement. The bed rock of the sector, those original Cantonese restaurants, are in peril. While there have been Chinese eateries in Britain since the 18th century, they expanded after the Second World War with an influx of immigrants from China. Most went into the restaurant business because few other options were available. Those original Cantonese chefs are now retired or deceased, and they wanted more for their kids, who in any case probably didn’t fancy the long hours. As Asian economies have boomed chefs from China no longer feel the need to make their living here. In any case British immigration rules are hardly hospitable.
Alan Yau was blunt. These days when he launches restaurants they’re in Asia – he described it as “a hobby” – and said it was impossible to find the staff here in the UK. Andy Kwok said the solution was simple: non-Chinese chefs had to be trained up in the techniques and skills. That, however, is a long game.
Looking for reassurance that all was OK, at least for the moment, I went direct from the event to Wentworth Street in London’s Spitalfields, home to the extravagantly named Xi’an Biang Biang Noodles, a sibling to the nearby Sichuan Folk. It takes its name and most of its food from the capital of Shaanxi Province in northwestern China, where wheat fields win out over rice fields, leading to a noodle culture. I say most of its food, because at the back of the menu, under the heading “others” is sweet and sour chicken, an Essex tan shade of orange, alongside egg fried rice and veg spring rolls. Those are specifically targeted at people who don’t really want to be here. The rest of it is a brilliant slap around the chops. It’s a nine-napkin job: for the splashes of chilli oil-boosted sauces that could take out a white shirt at 10 paces, and for the dribbles of sweat. These are all good things.
Fittingly, for such noisy, fighty food, the space is a big, brightly lit canteen, with wipe-down tables and blown-up Chinese picture-book illustrations on the walls. While the main plates can be for sharing they also work well for one and there was a pleasing number of solo diners with a book and a beer. I always think better of restaurants where people feel comfortable eating alone.
The menu comes with gloriously garish pictures which should be my guide. Then again, we have our waiter, who has a point of view. I point at a chicken dish. He shakes his head. “Have the beef.” I ask why. He tells me it’s better. I can’t quite muster an argument. I move on to a bowl of seafood. He points at a violently shimmering image of noodles in vegetable broth instead. It seems he is in charge. He allows me to choose between spicy and sour and just spicy. I choose the former. He says I should have the latter, but oh well.
We start with cold dishes. There’s a plate of slippery black fungus with chilli, coriander and vinegar which is an alarm clock for the tongue. The menu description includes the word “refreshing”, and I can do no better. Next to it is a plate of something altogether darker and more intense: long-braised beef served cold, in chilli oil with numbing peppercorns and pieces of cucumber and spring onion. It is luscious and compelling. We also get a light chicken broth with pork and vegetable wonton. When your next cold hits you will want to be eating this. It’s your mum’s hug in a bowl.
The beef and noodle dish our man ordered us to have is a great call. Piled on the plate like this, ribbon noodles have a tangled, bleached offal look, as if they were innards. Don’t let me put you off. These ribbon noodles are absurdly satisfying: broad, slightly misshapen, slicked in fragrant oils and flakes of chilli. They are the very definition of joyous slurp.
The second dish comes with thinner hand-pulled noodles, in a dark and powerful hot and sour broth, bobbing with chickpeas and brassic greens. There is no way to eat this food elegantly so don’t bother trying. Just get your mouth over the bowl, lift the noodles and suck. Festoon yourself in napkins tucked into every crevice of your clothing as if you are trying to mitigate the impact of a blast zone, which in a way you are. We finish with a plate of crunchy steamed greens in garlic sauce, and the sense that our waiter has done us proud.
The drinks list is short, mostly beers and a couple of sturdy serviceable wines. Ignore the dessert list. It’s a laminated card of things which look like they might have been unloaded from one frozen environment to another. Just wander up the road to the increasingly glossy Spitalfields covered market, and satisfy your sweet tooth there. Xi’ian Biang Biang Noodles – it ought to be a song lyric –feels like it has been engineered for the current economic circumstances. It’s a utilitarian, great value enterprise posited on high-volume trade. What matters is the uncompromising punch of the cooking. I left thinking all really was well in the world of London’s Chinese restaurants. At least for now.
Jay’s news bites
Laksamania recently opened on London’s Newman Street and is getting attention for all the right reasons: their Singapore laksa, just one of six on offer, is deep and rich, made with two types of noodles, fully garnished and exactly the thing as we head into autumn. I also adored their crisp chicken wings and their bao, stuffed with slow cooked, glazed pork belly (laksamania.co.uk).
The brilliant Magic Breakfast provides morning meals for primary school kids in deprived areas who might otherwise arrive too hungry to learn. In association with Family Action they have received funding from the Department for Education to roll this service out to 1,770 schools. But they need the schools to register an interest. In the first instance visit magicbreakfast.com or email nsbp@family-action.org.uk
Chef Lee Westcott, formerly of the highly praised Typing Room in London’s Bethnal Green has announced his new restaurant. Pensons will be housed in once derelict farm buildings, part of the Netherwood Estate, in Worcestershire.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
