A Quick Look at Baiwei, Chinatown

If I had to pick a cookbook that I refer back to time and time again, it would be Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop. The pages of my copy are well-used, splattered with oil and various bits of debris, and while I also loved Every Grain of Rice, Sichuan Cookery is an altogether more serious tome. Less pictures and more in-depth, it encouraged me to explore Sichuan cuisine further. Dunlop herself has a fascinating background as the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, China, so she knows her stuff. 

Baiwei is a new restaurant on Little Newport Street and Dunlop consulted on the menu. Originally, it was controversially named 'Big Leap Forward' (by its Chinese owner, Dunlop claimed) but they've now decided upon Baiwei - Chinese for 'a hundred flavours'. When we visited for lunch I was surprised by the interior - I had expected something sleeker like Dunlop's other consultations, Ba Shan and Bar Shu. Instead, the room was spartan save for some Maoist propaganda decorations. Our table on the ground floor faced the dumbwaiter, but the star table appears to be the one in this photo, looking out onto the street. Other diners were directed upstairs, though I didn't think to poke my head in to have a look around. 

The menu is lengthy, divided into cold dishes and hot. Pictures accompany descriptions to give a better idea of presentation and portion size. Once we'd ordered, the dishes came quickly; we kicked off with cold sliver salad. Surprisingly wide chewy noodles were mixed in with slivered vegetables and pork in a vinegary, sesame-spiked dressing. Incredibly garlicky, incredibly moreish, though I do wish it was a touch spicier. 

We couldn't resist the cold aubergine dish, mainly because it was served with preserved egg (century egg). This came mixed well into the dish, the grey/brown translucent egg whites appearing every other mouthful. Eaten with some hot rice, this dish was really great. 

Lamb with roasted rice (made by steaming the meat and ground rice together in a bowl) didn't look entirely appealing on the plate being the big brown cluster of meat it was. Looks aside, it packed some serious flavour and the meat was chop-stick tender, though again while we could see the chilli flecks, it was lacking in any spiciness. 

Dan dan noodles with beef was the only dish that had any chilli-heat to speak of, with a slight tingle of Sichuan peppercorns on the tongue. The noodles were appropriately chewy. Once mixed together, the spicy sesame dressing made this a rich and delicious bowl of noodles definitely made for sharing.

The beef and coriander wontons 'in a rich beef broth' was the only dish that disappointed and I wouldn't order it again. Though the beef and coriander filling was nice enough, the broth was a bit unpleasant, a bit too reminiscent of dishwater for my liking. 

Baiwei had some really interesting dishes on the menu that I'd love to go back to try - indeed, the table next to us ordered a big dish served with flat-bread-like pancakes that looked pretty special. I'm slightly confused by the tameness of the dishes; at least two of the things we ordered had a big red chilli next the to menu listing, but it all seemed very mild to us. One can only hope it's not the oft-typical dumbing down of dishes for the Westerners. 

Their pricing seems a little off too - potstickers were listed on the menu at £6.90, while the dan dan noodles at their considerable size were £4.90. Similarly our lamb dish was at £6.90, though the gong bao tofu £8.90 - same with the 'pressed tofu and vegetable stir-fry' - it seems odd to me that vegetarian / vegetable dishes are more expensive. As it was, we paid £20 a head with (very good and polite) service for 5 dishes, 1 shared rice and a soft drink each. Pretty good value for the standard of food we had, though definitely at the higher end of what one would usually pay in Chinatown. 

Baiwei

8 Little Newport Street
London
WC2H 7JJ

Licky Chop, London Fields

Last Summer, one of the most enjoyable afternoons I've spent was at Burnt Enz, a pop-up barbecue under the arches at London Fields. When one thinks of barbecue it's easy to conjure up images of long, slow-smoked pork and sticky ribs, as is currently in vogue. Burnt Enz had none of that; seafood and meat cooked quickly on charcoal grills, doused with interesting sauces and pretty dressings. And then they buggered off to Singapore. Sob.

Licky Chops, offshoot of Lucky Chip, has taken over this site this year. The grill area has moved across the yard, and big brick ovens installed. Not a burger in sight, the menu is just as interesting as its' predecessor. 

A lone octopus tentacle was smoky, charred and tender. It yielded easily under the knife and fork on a bed of jet-black garlicky sauce, to be mopped up by a few firm and buttery new potatoes. 

Mackerel had that same level of smokiness, and our plastic cutlery was defeated by the structural strength of the toast it lay upon. Bright, acidic tomatoes balanced the richness of the fish; it's not a new combination, but one done well. 

Asparagus, new potatoes and wild garlic was tasty, but a bit of a rip for the £6 price tag as it warranted around a mouthful each. Still, with the sun uncharacteristically blazing on us, the green freshness was welcome. 

Onglet steak with chimichurri was served very rare and seasoned generously with a good char. The chimichurri sauce could have done with a bit more punch. Fat, plump and juicy scallops in their shell came with dill and cucumber and while my friends weren't entirely convinced by hot cucumber, I thought it a clever combination.  

The ovens were put to good use for the aubergine, smothered and baked in tomato sauce and covered generously with cheese. Hake with coco beans that day was a beautiful chunk of fish, though the beans were over-salted. So while the meal wasn't entirely perfect, at around £15 - £20 a head for the food, it was really reasonable for it not to bother too much. The next time the sun comes out to play, I'm going back for more; their menu is always changing.

Thursday 5.30-10pm
Friday 5.30-11pm
Saturday 12.30-11pm
Sunday 12.30-9pm

Climpson & Sons Coffee Roastery, 

Arch 374 Helmsley Place

E8 3SB

@lickychops

Rochelle Canteen

When London's sunny, it is a wonderful place. It happens so infrequently that when I got an email from a friend inviting me along to his impromptu lunch booking at Rochelle Canteen, I ditched everything and jumped at the chance.

Rochelle Canteen is a well-kept secret, unusual, perhaps, for its location. Situated inside a school down the backstreets of Shoreditch, it is converted from an old bike shed and manned by Melanie Arnold & Margot Henderson. I skipped towards my lunch date armed with detailed instructions, for it is not exactly straightforward to find. Tables were set out in the sunlight, overlooking a pretty grassy courtyard; sun hats hung on pegs inside. A simple menu keenly priced and devoid of any fussy adjectives made me want everything, while a blackboard of specials tempted further. 

A whole globe artichoke with a bright yellow, creamy vinaigrette got us started while we deliberated on how best the four of us could try out as much as possible. Pork crackling was a crunchy, fat-laced delight, while Bantam egg mayo was soft-yolked and seductive. Carrying on an egg theme, a dollop of brandade (above) was whipped to impossible lightness, the accompanying pheasant egg adding a little richness. The toast soon ran out but no matter, we shovelled it straight from the fork. 

Initially I was a bit apprehensive of the rabbit offal salad with snails, mainly through ignorance of said offal. I needn't have worried as the liver and kidneys were cooked to a blushing pink, delicate and inoffensive in flavour. Each mouthful alternated happily between soft comfort and the crunch of a crouton, near-soaked with dressing. I'm totally down with the rabbit offal, though I felt the earthy snails perhaps a bit superfluous. 

From apprehension to downright excitement, barbecued quail with celeriac remoulade was the dish I had zoned in on instantaneously. Quail is one of my favourite things to eat - Barrafina's version perhaps being the best - but this one was damn close. I marvelled at how the skin was crispy and had the flavour of smoke and charcoal from the barbecue, while the meat inside was juicy and pink. Cutlery was abandoned for feral fingers, an inane grin on my face. 

They obviously know their birds at Rochelle; the chicken with green beans and aioli was a handsome dish. The chicken was a breast and a thigh, both crisp-skinned and juicy. Lemon-yellow aioli was punchy and a handful of green and yellow beans, generously dressed, retained their squeak. It was a fine example of simplicity in decent ingredients cooked well. 

Bream with cucumber and samphire was as well cooked, the flesh pulling easily off the bones. Happily served whole, it gave me the opportunity to have a dig around the head a little to extract the sweet nuggets of fish cheek (classic Chinese...). Meanwhile, the kitchen was near closing and thankfully one of the party begged and pleaded with the staff for a bowl of potatoes. I wasn't that fussed (and was, if I'm honest, borderline full) but when the potatoes presented themselves, simply steamed and dressed with butter, I had a little 'moment'. The Potato Moment. It was the sweetest, most potatoey, silken potato I'd ever had the pleasure of eating. I tried another to make sure - yep. Best potatoes ever.

After such a potato high, perhaps it wasn't the fault of the lamb that I didn't find that dish particularly remarkable; braised until the meat fell apart with fat, olive-green peas, the hint of mint was pleasant but I found it all a bit same same. 

After a little breather over some cheese (one variety only is offered - that day it was a goaty number) desserts sounded ordinary enough on paper. The ice cream was the very essence of strawberry, while a peach meringue with ice cream was both decadent and well-balanced with fruit. 

Rochelle Canteen is BYO and we'd enjoyed some fantastic wines by this point. By the time we'd paid (our bill came to a meagre £30 / head before service) the offices of Bishopsgate were belching their staff homewards. Not even the hustle and bustle of everyone trying to elbow their way home fazed me, and I remember thinking 'GOD life is good'. Not a lot of meals make me do that. I blame my sentimental turn on Those Potatoes. 

Here's the kicker though - they're only open on weekday lunchtimes, 12pm - 3pm (though you can also have breakfast there 9 - 11:30am and tea, 3 - 4:30pm). Whatever - find a sunny day, some hungry friends and clear your diary.

Rochelle Canteen

Rochelle School   
Arnold Circus  
London  E2 7ES
020 7729 5677

The Begging Bowl - Revisited

I'm as guilty as the next blogger of rushing to restaurants when they first open and making a snap judgement from them, as was the case of The Begging Bowl in Peckham. When it first opened I was there with a large table of friends and though their Thai food was nice enough, it was just that - nice enough. Their dishes were, I felt, well conceived but lacking a little in punch. Therefore, when I came home to find my housemates slumped in front of the couch on a Saturday night, wrapped in blankets and watching The Titanic, I commanded them to get up and join me for dinner. Anything to escape an evening of Cameron's drudgery (I saw it at the cinema THREE times, and sobbed all the way through on the last two watchings...).

Pretty damn pleased I did so too, as we nabbed the last table outside under the heaters. It was a difficult menu to choose from. Deep fried pork belly kicked things off, crisp yet tender, the spicy dip helping things along. We squabbled over the last pieces. 

Grilled sardines and raw vegetables came with a caveat that this was a fishy dish, and indeed it was. The dip had the fermented funk I've smelled / tasted before, and while one housemate found it overwhelmingly so, I thought it brave to serve something quite so... rotten tasting. It brought me right back to the meal we'd had at Nahm in Bangkok. 

Show-stopper was a whole deep fried seabass, garnished with deep fried basil leaves, shallots and chilli. The fish was decimated by us, prising out nuggets of moist and crisp flesh. Each dish was accompanied by sticky rice and jasmine rice, the former perfect for the drier more salad-like dishes, the latter more suited to soaking up an incandescently spicy vegetable curry. Air was sucked through teeth and sweat broke upon brow. The curry was pretty phenomenal - something so seemingly straight-forward and ordered really to fill the vegetable quota, it had so many flavours going on, perked up by a garnish of chilli and cucumber. 

Marinated raw salmon salad came with sweet and sour strips of green mango, quelling those flames the curry had set us alight with. Service was harried but sweet, and the packed out restaurant smelled reassuringly of spice and fish sauce. 

With a bottle of wine, we were stuffed to the gills (7 dishes is, in hindsight, one too many for 3 people...) for a princely sum of £35 a head. I feel quite blessed to have such a brilliant restaurant local to me, and quite smug that I got over my initial judgements to revisit, as it's a restaurant that's served one of my favourite meals in 2013 so far. 

The Begging Bowl 

168 Bellenden Road

Peckham
SE15 4BW

No reservations

Red-Braised Beef with Noodles

Well... They were supposed to be hand-rolled noodles. You see, I went to Mama Wang's supperclub at The Dead Dolls Club and I was totally taken by their biang biang noodles, served with cumin-braised lamb (photo below). The noodles were chewy and rough around the edges, made by rolling long sausages of dough and slapped on a work surface to get a flat shape out of them. When I came to do some slapping of my own though, my heavy-handedness and eagerness to eat them shone through and they slapped straight out of my hands and into pieces. 

I improvised. In absence of a rolling pin, I rolled the dough out with a mezcal bottle, smirking at the indentations the bottle gave it. Still too thick and quickly losing patience, I eventually put the dough through a pasta machine to give it a more uniform thickness. Perhaps not entirely traditional, but it worked well enough and I was left with sheets of noodles, ready to cook. It wasn't until after I ate them that I remembered that I'd made noodles before, and a recipe much closer to the one I was trying to achieve was here.  

Still, the noodles made a damn fine change to rice, which I normally eat with this red-braised beef. Probably more suited to Winter climes, it's rich and comforting, spicy from the Sichuan chilli bean paste. Any cut of beef suited to slow cooking works here, though I find cuts like shin and ox cheek preferable to give some gelatin to the dish. Pork works perfectly well in place of the beef; a cut like belly would take it to ultimate decadence. 

Red-Braised Beef

Serves 4 with sides and rice / noodles

450gr beef for slow cooking, cut into bitesized pieces
20gr ginger, whole and skin still on, whacked with the side of a knife
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and slightly crushed
2 tbsp chilli bean paste
1 tbsp yellow bean paste
1 star anise
2 tbsp Shaoxing rice wine
2 spring onions, white only (reserve the green bits) 
500ml stock / water

Blanch the beef in boiling water then rinse and rinse the pot out. This is to get rid of the scum that clouds the broth. Place the beef in a claypot or a snug saucepan.

In a wok, heat up a little oil and stir fry the chilli bean paste with the ginger and garlic and the spring onion. Add the yellow bean paste, rice wine, then add the star anise and the stock / water. Bring to the boil and add to the beef. Put a lid on it and braise very slowly for 3 - 4 hours, until the beef is tender. Top up with a little water (or the stock if it didn't all fit) if it is looking dry. 

Serve garnished with the spring onion greens leftover, on rice or on noodles. 

Morito

Exmouth Market is one of those places where when it's sunny, I'm sure it's lovely. On this particular May evening, it was hammering down with rain. Equidistant by about a mile from any tube station, it is what is known as a right pain in the arse to get to. When you walk inside Morito though, you can't help but feel immediately happier, from both the smells coming from the grill and the sunny orange tones that decorate an otherwise quite spartan room.

The baby sibling of Moro next door, couples are invited to sit at the bar (my preferred spot for dining, if I'm honest) while larger groups huddle around small tables that line the wall. Space is at a premium here; music is lively but the hum of conversations is at a decent level. 

It is described as a tapas and mezze bar; to me it was more familiar as tapas, with a few Middle Eastern touches thrown in. We were given samples of various sherries to taste as we had uhm'd and ah'd over the selection, the padron peppers a decent accompaniment. Alas, not a hot one in our batch, they'd have benefitted from a hotter pan but were otherwise pleasant enough. 

Salt cod croquetas were well fried and light, their insides flavoursome and nicely accompanied by the lemony mayonnaise. Spiced shreds of lamb with pine nuts and pomegranate was served on a creamy bed of mashed aubergines, and I wish we'd ordered some of the delicious-looking flatbreads to scoop it up with. Forks sufficed. 

Fried baby squid, called puntillitas, were perfectly crisp and tender, sometimes juicy in their little bodies. Sprinkled with sumac, they cried out for some sort of aioli or sauce to dip them in. Palermo prawns (below) with mojo verde were pretty stunning; sweet flesh and grilled with garlic, it was livened by the sprightly coriander sauce. A Mexican stand-off of hungry eyes met over the plate for the remaining fifth prawn. We begrudgingly shared.

Seafood seems to be a strong point of theirs, as demonstrated by a pretty plate of octopus salad and incredibly sweet tomatoes. Capers and red onion were boosted by fronds of dill and monks beard. An accomplished dish, it was a nice change from the usual paprika-dusted octopus you often see at tapas bars. 

Meat dishes, on balance, were less successful. Duck hearts and gizzards (back dish) sounded interesting on the menu but sadly weren't up to much on the plate. While the pork belly was well cooked with tender flesh and crackled skin, it was unbearably salty. The waitress gave me a shrug when mentioned. The morcilla that arrived atop the vibrant braised peas and orange was largely ignored, though we scooped up the vegetables hungrily. We were revived with meaty grilled asparagus spears, tarted up with chopped egg and dill. 

A meal of ups and downs food-wise, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. It might have been the bottle of Txakoli, poured at a height to emphasize the fizz, that did it. More likely that was the seafood dishes that really were very good, and the staff friendly and engaging. Oh, and that boozy finish of raisin ice cream drenched in sticky Pedro Ximenez to send us off out to the gusting rain. That helped too. 

Not cheap, as decent tapas rarely is for those of us with appetites. When I was approached by Match.com (who sponsored this post) to eat out at a date venue with an £80 budget, my research suggested that these days, £40 a head doesn't get you far unless you're teetotal. And no one wants to be on a teetotal date now do they? We smashed that budget with our £125 bill, but really a couple dishes less wouldn't have killed the mood. 

Morito

32 Exmouth Market

London EC1R 4QE

(No bookings. We turned up at 7:30pm which was fine - any later and it was packed)

Malaysian Deli

One of the more vivid memories I have of my time in Malaysia in 2011 was a lunch prepared by my friend's aunty. In preparation for our 23 hour train from Penang to Bangkok, curried prawns in their shells were packed into plastic tubs along with rice, a boiled egg and some vegetables. Hot at 7am when we set off, it preyed on my mind that the rice was cooling, sitting in the Malaysian warmth for a few hours before it would be eaten. Some would call that dangerous - see bacillus cereus - but no one else seemed fussed. I threw caution to the wind and, some hours later, wolfed down my incredibly delicious lunch. No doom befell me.

I bring this rather gnarly story up as the food at Malaysia Deli, a new place in Crofton Park, reminded me much of the lunchbox Aunty packed up for me in its composition. For only a fiver, you get a box of rice with a meat or fish, some vegetables and whichever sauce you choose. I uhm'd and aah'd over each one, asking the nice lady behind the counter which was which while she patiently explained the choices. I finally settled on salmon with sambal sauce; when asked if I wanted it heated up, I elected not to. Hot rice was layered into the box, two crisp salmon pieces next and that fiery sauce. On the cycle home, the hot rice heated up everything else in there, making my lunch perfectly warmed and ready to eat. 

It doesn't look like much (I went over a few speed bumps...) but it was lovely - tender salmon, crunchy beans and perfectly cooked rice. But HOLY MOTHER that sambal. I wish they'd sell it as a jarred sauce. Sweet and spicy, I started off feeling a tingle of heat; by the end of my lunch I was sucking air through my teeth while my housemate laughed at me. Worth it, and I'd do it again. Though I might try the percik next time - described as a mild, sweet, tangy coconut sauce. 

Cute and colourful inside, they sell ingredients as well as meals. They have a few tables and open 12pm - 8pm Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 6pm on Sundays; I'm looking forward to revisiting, especially for the nasi ulam, a dish I haven't come across before. 

Malaysian Deli

338 Brockley Road, London SE4 2BT