Gourmet Diner
NEVER, a self-proclaimed sage once advised me, recommend a Chinese restau- rant. It would be just too unreliable a prac- tice. Nightly, or so he held, gaming tables are set up in steamy basement rooms in Soho — picture, I suppose, an oriental Damon Runyan scene — and restaurants, chefs, whole oriental culinary empires are lost and won over hands of fan-tan. Which obviously means that you never know who owns which restaurant in Chinatown or how long present management will last.
So I haven't made much of a habit of reviewing Chinese restaurants over the years. It's not that there aren't the restau- rants — obviously not (although I note that only this month Indian has taken over the lead from Chinese as the foreign food most often eaten in Britain) — or even that those that exist have struck me as particu- larly unreliable from visit to visit, but sim- ply that, when compared with any other oriental food available now in this country, Chinese food is strikingly inferior.
This is not just a matter of fashion, though that does have something to do with it. And it's certainly not a matter of the inherent nature of Chinese cuisine. It may have been downgraded over past years as Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese and increas- ingly Korean food have found fashionable favour, but there are still times when you want a Chinese and nothing else will do. Unfortunately, you will have a hard time finding Chinese food that comes anywhere near the exquisite cooking you find in, say, Paris or New York. (I presume it's better still in Hong Kong, but I prefer to base my judgments on my own experience, and I am alarmingly ill-travelled.) Of course — and this is where the fash- ion factor comes in — the trendier oriental cuisines are relatively late imports; Chinese food, however, has been so long a part of the British culinary landscape that it has become refracted in the prism of English cooking and English tastes. The heavy, fat- soused spring rolls, the soggy sweet and sour, the indifferently seasoned meat dish- es in their jammy sauces: these bespeak a distinctly homegrown Chinese cuisine.
To some degree, this has changed, even if the changes — lighter food, less formula- ic interpretations — are noticeable only in the top end of the market. Though this, perhaps, is inevitable: the significance, however, may reside in the fact that, for Chinese restaurants, there is now a recog- nisable top end of the market at all. The Dorchester's Oriental is without doubt where you'd go to encounter it. Expansive setting, expensive food: £40-ish a head and not a chop suey on the menu.
Easy enough to recommend and, as long as you're warned of the cost, you are unlikely to be disappointed. But during my only rarely broken silence on the subject of Chinese restaurants, I have been working towards a more useful aim: to find out which I think is the best Chinese restaurant in Soho. When you're in Chinatown, or plan to go there after the theatre or what- ever it may be, it is practically impossible to know where to plump for or even what cri- teria to apply in deciding. I have been up and down those mean streets and have, after digesting and deliberating, come up with the answer: the Gourmet Diner.
Now, I know that of all the names of all the places in Soho this sounds just about the naffest and least 'authentic' — whatev- er that may mean — and it is for that very reason you may have avoided the place and therefore need my recommendation. It is, actually, hardly a restaurant: just a box of a room with a gleaming aluminium open- plan kitchen at the front and with a room and more tables upstairs. Decor is minimal, though not in any modish sense. In other words, if you want peach tablecloths and 'I'm sorry. I work for British Airways.' lanterns go instead to the camper installa- tions in Gerrard Street.
It would be irresponsible of me to heap excessive praise on the Gourmet Diner. To claim too much for it would be to invite dis- appointment: you won't, like the mythical Persian priest on tasting his celebrated stuffed aubergine, faint dead away with the pleasure of it all, but the Gourmet Diner is, I'm prepared to go so far, significantly bet- ter than any other Chinese restaurant la the vicinity.
Some dishes are, for all my mealy- mouthedess, worthy of more extravagant praise. The crispy roast duck is one of them. The waiter will tell you it comes cold. In fact it is that perfect temperature, just warm, the temperature of meat you can't stop picking at when you clear the table at the end of a meal. It is the perfect texture too: the burnished chestnut skin which gleams like lacquer is crisp; the fat-soft- ened flesh tender and velvety. Seafood soup with chachoy, preserved vegetables, comes as a clear golden broth, rather in the Thai style, full of depth and heat, plump prawns and chiselled curls of squid, and better by far than any Chinese soup I've had before.
Other dishes, while exciting a less exu- berant response, nevertheless commanded respect. Fried chopped ribs with salt and chili were only marginally inferior to the model of their kind, as found in the Penh? sula Restaurant in George Street, Oxford. Fillet steak with chili and black beans had a salty, smoky intensity, and fried rice sticks, those sticky flat noodles which cluniP together like a gluey tangle of jellied rib- bons, gratified and satisfied.
There is a special menu for the New Year, although I can't tell you much about it, since it is written in Chinese only. Tills, though, is a good sign, as indeed is the fact that on every visit I've made to the Gourmet Diner quite a sizeable majority of those eating there have been Chinese. Depending on how much I've eaten, I've spent from £9 to £20 (including a tip) WI- dinner there. And another thing in the restaurant's favour is the fact that it stays open until 5 in the morning every day Qf the week.
I have also discovered what I am eon" vinced must be one of the best Chinese takeaways in London. Over the past feW years my fields of enquiry have included east, west and north (south I have never had cause nor desire to investigate) and Ming's in 471 Harrow Road W10 (open daily, 5 p.m. till midnight, tel. 081-969 4800) strikes me as better than quite a few proPer sit-down restaurants and certainly supert,er to the average counter-top takeaway. I 11/ afraid you need to live nearby and have a car for this one as they don't deliver.
Gourmet Diner, 27 Wardour Street (Inoe Leicester Square end), Wl; teL 071-287 657°
Nigella Lawson
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