Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall, Colindale

I'm not really sure how to go about reviewing a food court, or even if it's possible. Technically a collection of restaurants all using the same dining space, and sharing little else in common with each other than branded plastic bowls and plates, recommending (or otherwise) Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall is potentially no more useful than recommending "Soho" as an area based on the strength of meals at Hoppers and Kiln. Yes, if you go to Hoppers or Kiln, you'll have a great time. But what if you end up at the Breakfast Club? Nightmare.

So, this post comes with a disclaimer - I loved Bang Bang, but perhaps I was lucky with the stalls I ate at, and maybe not all are up to the same standards I enjoyed at the conclusion of a 21-stop(!) trip up the Northern Line to Colindale on Sunday. There's a part of me suspects very strongly though that I wasn't just lucky, and that picking your way through the myriad of options in this aircraft hanger-sized food court is one of the most enjoyable ways of spending your weekend it's possible to have.

First up, fried pork dumplings from Xi Home. The minimum order is £9.80 for 12 of the things, which seems like a lot until you start eating them and then realise it's nowhere near enough. Each had a good amount of pork mince and enough stock to occasionally fire a boiling hot squirt of liquid across the room when you bit into them, which was as hilarious as it was tasty.

Uncle Chilli specialise in Sichuan cuisine, which if you're not aware largely means two things - lots of heat, and lots of offal. The menu listed 'skewers' at £2 each, but instead of being presented with things on sticks like I was expecting, the slices of beef trip, pig stomach and beef brisket were served in a big bowl of soup, blazing with Sichuan peppers. The trickier bits of a pig - particularly anything involving intestines - will never have universal adoration, but this stuff is my own personal regional Chinese heaven.

Also from Uncle Chilli was a bowl of Century Eggs, hen's eggs treated to a mysterious process I think involving salt and ash which makes the yolk go dark green and the white turn transluscent amber. Doused in soy and garlic, they're a classic Sichuanese/Hunanese snack, and well worth ordering if you ever see them on a menu.

Soft, salty slices of belly pork, soaked in oil and soy sauce and topped with minced garlic, were similarly addictive. Many of the concessions at Bang Bang are offshoots of larger restaurants - One 68, for example, is run by Royal China - and if that's true of Uncle Chilli I really want to visit the mothership. Because these people are good.

Speaking of One 68, their dim sum is excellent - here piping hot siu mai of fresh, bouncy seafood, going very well dipped in chilli sauce...

...and silky cheung fun, bulging with big fat prawns and worth every bit of the £4 or so they cost.

Just as in Chinatown itself, it's impossible to not be tempted by the glistening, golden brown roast ducks hanging in the Four Seasons stall, and it's a pleasure to report they ate as good as they looked here at Bang Bang, with a nicely seasoned breast meat skin,and without a hint of dryness. Next to it on a bed of rice is pork belly, with a delicate crisp skin and expertly rendered, moist flesh.

And we weren't quite done yet. Pastries from Wonder Bake included somethings called 'Lava cheese tarts', an interesting cross between savoury and sweet that had a hot, molten filling. Oh, and the Pandan Egg tarts weren't bad, either.

So yes, maybe we were lucky. Maybe the ramen from Samurai Ryu isn't brilliant, or the Pad Thai from Little Thai Silk isn't worth the money. These are possibilities. But it makes sense that if the same people that curated the inclusion of Royal China, Four Seasons, Uncle Chilli and Wonder Bake also had the same standards set for their fellow stallholders then chances are it's all bloody good. In fact, the only reason Bang Bang may not be for everyone is that eating all this fantastic food does involve a rather fraught ordering process (order, pay, take wireless buzzer and then try and remember which of the 30 stalls it came from when it starts buzzing) and seating, especially during the hours we were there, is quite hard to come by - expect a gaggle of people to gather nearby whenever it looks like you're gathering your coat to leave.

But these are normal food court things, and hardly a reason not to visit. Even the journey, way up to the top of the furthest above-ground reaches of the Northern Line, seemed like a very small price to pay as we rolled home, happy and full, to our south of the river homes. Every Londoner should be happy that Bang Bang exists, but residents within reasonable distance should be absolutely over the moon, and planning their next visit as soon as possible. Indeed, new stalls are still opening, so it's only going to get busier - and better - from here. Happy eating.

Xi Home 9/10
Uncle Chilli 9/10
One 68 8/10
Four Seasons 8/10
Wonder Bake 7/10

Overall 8/10

Amidst the chaos of ordering I only managed to take a photo of one of the bills - from Uncle Chilli. Other prices are as above.

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Bao, Fitzrovia

I have a rule that I only write about one restaurant in a group. Generally, no matter how accomplished the second or third branch is, with so many of the same dishes appearing and very often so many of the same staff being involved in all sites, there just isn't enough new material to cover. For example, all Patty & Bun are good; all Tonkotsu are good; all Wright Bros are good. All Hawksmoor and Goodman are good (man). But despite the odd variation in the menu they're all good because they have a certain core set of dishes they can produce consistently and to a high standard, and that doesn't make for particularly interesting copy.

But sometimes, rules are there to be broken. Sometimes a restaurant group comes along so profoundly different to everything that has come before, so groundbreaking in its approach to the business of eating out, that if they opened a hundred branches serving exactly the same menu I would still find enough new things to say about them in a hundred new blog posts. This has only happened twice in my time living in London. First was the Meatwagon/MeatEasy/MeatLiquor family tree, each stage of which along the way to national domination I covered with ecstatic burger-geek glee because it really was that important - an obsessive knowledge of what makes a good burger, matched with an irresistible funky dive-bar aesthetic and bolshy attitude. MeatLiquor, even its detractors must acknowledge, changed absolutely everything.

And now, there's Bao. I'm not about to make any grand predictions about how influential this pair of cool-as-a-cucumber Taiwanese snack bars will end up being; that's not my job, nor even, at this stage, is it important. But I can tell you that I feel the same about the two branches of Bao as I did about MeatWagon all those years ago - that this is a supremely talented bunch of people with the means to do exactly what they want to do, and a meal there is an experience so utterly and consistently rewarding that if it's not one of your favourite restaurants in London you haven't eaten there yet, simple as that.

The joy of Bao isn't just about the food - these things never are. The clean, modernist lines of the interiors of both branches compliment the exact, unfussy dishes served in them, to the extent that the whole operation - certainly including the smiley staff in their clean white labcoats - feels like a kind of experimental art project. I'm sure things like the "chicken chop with soy cured egg" or "beef cheek and tendon nuggets" would still taste great served under a motorway sliproad, but in these zen-like spaces they really shine.

There is not a single item on the Bao menu that you wouldn't want to eat over and over again until you did yourself an injury, so choosing a lunch for one is pure torture. I'd recommend going with at least one friend, so you can put the little mark in as many boxes on the menu as possible (the Bao ordering system is a little paper form and a pencil, meaning you can keep track of what you've ordered and - more importantly - add to it again and again when you realise what a great time you're having). But most people will probably start with the titular Bao, fluffy little bright-white rice flour buns filled with, alternatively, softly sweet pork belly, beef shortrib, umami-rich blackened cod and a nugget of breadcrumbed daikon which makes about as good a case for the vegetarian option as you could possibly imagine.

In any other restaurant I'd describe "Cep broth, duck breast" as a "must order" except such advice is going to be useless at Bao when everything is brilliant. It is an astonishingly lovely thing though, a salty, earthy mushroom consommé matched with a couple of slices of pink, gamey duck breast, and to miss out on it would be a terrible crime.

Similarly this salad of raw prawn and potato, which is full of surprising colours and textures and seasoned precisely enough that each element presented at its absolute best. I'm not normally a fan of raw prawn, so for me to want to polish off a second plate of this as soon as the first had disappeared is a real achievement.

I can't imagine a situation when you wouldn't want to order this dish of soy-cured pork loin with ginger and chives, either. Beautifully soft and sweet slices of pork, soaked in a gentle soy dressing, it's as blissful to eat as it is attractive to look upon. Another must-order.

Of course, it goes without saying that you can't eat at Bao without trying the fried chicken, one of the few non-Bao items carried over from the Soho menu. A generous supreme of chicken in a glorious bubbly crust, it comes with a remarkable cured egg yolk which acts as a kind of innovative dipping sauce. Whether this is a Taiwanese staple I was hitherto unaware of or whether this was entirely Bao's idea, it's still a very special thing.

Pork "bak kwa" turned out to be three, faintly transluscent geometrically-exact squares of dry-cured pork, served with a fruity chilli dipping sauce. Now, there may be some people out there - members of certain religions perhaps, or the terminally insane - who for whatever reason cannot enjoy squares of sweet-salty cured pork dipped in chilli sauce, but I am certainly not one of them. And so this dish is, also, unmissable.

Even the drinks are borne of true invention and an attention to detail bordering on exhausting. This pretty thing, the "Yakult float", is I think a yuzu mixture topped with a yoghurt mousse squirted out of one of those cheffy squirty canister things (no I don't know what they're called), and feels like it's doing you good as well as tasting great. So you definitely have to order that, too.

Do you really need any more reasons to visit? How about the "crispy cabbage", a brittle leaf of fried greenery with a smooth-as-silk cream dipping sauce, which explodes in the mouth with salt and vegetal flavour. Can you imagine a world in which you went for a meal at Bao and didn't order the crispy cabbage? Could you look your friends in the eye afterwards? Could you learn to live with yourself? No, thought not.

So. If everything is brilliant, as I've said (which it is), then how on earth do you choose what to order? I have no easy answer to that, except to say that in the long run it won't be a problem because I can't see anyone just visiting Bao once. This is a restaurant to worship and obsess over. Its food, unique to this location and so completely unlike anywhere else, is, without exaggeration, something approaching perfect in almost every regard, from quality of ingredients to refinement of presentation. Service is unfailingly warm and attentive, and you enjoy all this in a dining room so beautiful if it were emptied of bars, stools and customers it could be used as an art gallery.

In short, restaurants like this do not come along very often. If I'm right (and I'm usually not), then it's just a matter of time before London goes Bao-mad. It may be copied, parodied or ripped-off. Somewhere called Bun or Boa will open in Soho serving slightly wonky versions of the famous Bao dishes. There will be the inevitable backlash as people too important to queue (pro-tip: you can book downstairs at Fitzrovia) dismiss it all as a stupid hipster fad and pretend they prefer Wagamama. All these things may happen. But there will always be the original and best, doing its thing so well, being brilliant again and again.

10/10

You may notice a couple of items on my first visit were comped - that was very kind of them, so I just left an extra big tip instead. I think they deserve it, don't you?

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Lahpet, London Fields

If you were ever coming to this blog looking for informed insight or intelligent food discussion, well you were always on a hiding to nothing. But I like to think that my exposure to the vast numbers of British, French, Spanish and Indian restaurants in London has meant at least I stand a better chance of saying something useful about those cuisines, even if occasionally just by accident, than most others. I'm getting better at Sichuan, I'm OK at Mexican, I can just about get away with stringing a few words together on Vietnamese or Thai, but Burmese?

But I can't feel too self-conscious about the fact I knew next to nothing about Burmese food before stepping foot into Lahpet because, let's face it, there aren't too many Burmese food experts knocking around anywhere outside Burma. Thanks to a military dictatorship and decades of global political isolation, this huge SE Asian country is only just now becoming known to the world, and the delights (or otherwise) of Burmese cuisine has yet to filter through to Western consciousness. The practical upshot of which is that I can be even more blithely ignorant than usual without feeling even the least bit guilty about it.

Lahpet, then, is a Burmese restaurant in London Fields, just over the road from where Som Saa did its own SE Asian thing all those years ago. It is unfortunately cursed with huge communal tables - enough to strike the fear of God into this particular diner - but fortunately on a quiet Wednesday night we had plenty of space to ourselves and didn't have to share any personal space. The menu is short, and not too baffling - a few words here and there that didn't mean much but generally not too indimidating to a Burmese food newcomer (which will be more or less everyone) and fairly keenly priced.

We ordered a couple of "fritters", two mains and - because they sounded interesting - all the sides. They offered to bring the "sun dried anchovies" side first, as they thought they would make a good snack. They sort of did - dry, crisp, with a bit of a chilli kick and plenty of umami flavour - but the pieces of anchovy were very tiny and quite difficult to scoop up, and felt more of a dressing or topping than a snack in their own right.

Fritters were fine but fairly unmemorable. Neither the triangles of fried tofu or the kidney bean "Mandalay" tasted of a great deal, and the provided tamarind sauce was underpowered and too thin to cling to the fritters when dipped in. Nice textures, but not much else.

Fortunately, the tea leaf salad was well worth the effort. Full of crunch and colour, shot through with Spanish-style dry-fried broad beans and sesame seeds, it would be vibrant and rewarding even without the tea leaf itself, which was pickled or fermented in some way as to produce an incredibly satisfying complex flavour. If this is Burmese cuisine, then consider me a fan.

Mains as of themselves were good - very good, in fact - but we could have probably done with a bit more guidance on ordering. I liked the look of the "hake masala" on paper, and enjoyed it very much in reality, the first being firm and meaty (if a tad on the dry side), and the masala sauce thick and rich. It all felt vaguely Indian, vaguely Malaysian, which I suppose is understandable given Burmese geographic borders.

Unfortunately, in their wisdom Lahpet advised us to order the coconut chicken noodles as our second main, which turned out to be dressed in exactly the same thick masala sauce as the hake. And despite the chicken itself being cooked perfectly well and a nice contrast between the normal wet noodles in the sauce and some crunchy dried noodles on the side of the bowl, eating both mains at the same time just ended up being a bit... samey. Maybe all of the Lahpet main courses come in the same sauce - maybe it's a Burmese thing. But if not, it's a strange thing to deliberately suggest.

And even stranger was the arrival of a second "side", another small sample of dried seafood (shrimp this time though the flavour wasn't markedly different), presented in another glass ashtray, defying use or explanation. If there was something I should have been doing with my two bowls of seafood crackling other than scooping them into my mouth with a slightly baffled expression on my face then, well, nobody made it obvious.

We didn't stay for "deserts" (sic) - the homemade ice creams sounded intriguing but they'll have to wait for another time. Because - and this may come as a bit of a surprise given my moaning above - I think I probably will be back to Lahpet. Despite the awkward way it was served and explained, there was something genuinely new going on here, perhaps not enough to herald a Burmese revolution in London but certainly enough to indicate that this is a cuisine that will impress more and more as it finds its feet - and an audience. As for the thorny question of authenticity, who knows - perhaps I'll leave it to actual experts like Burmese cookbook author MiMi Aye to have a look at the menu above and see how closely it represents anything from the home country. Meantime, I'll scurry back to my comfort zone and leave them to it. Have the salad. It's nice.

6/10

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