Imagine Walter Raleigh returning to James I’s court. “Majesty, unfortunately we didn’t manage to find El Dorado and the uncountable riches of the New World. However, I think it’s fair to say the trip wasn’t a complete failure. We have brought back some fascinating new comestibles. Try a bit of this.” “Och aye, and what do you call this, Sir Walter? Chilli, is it? Give us a wee one, then. Aaarrgh! Jings! Off with the regicidal murthering ned’s heed!”
The desire to have severe pain inflicted on the most intimate, delicate and sensitive bits of your body defies explanation. No amount of boffinry explaining that chillis remind us of orgasms really seems to make sense. I’ve had an orgasm and it’s not remotely reminiscent of inadvertently chewing a little red jobbie. But still, chillies have made their way into virtually every national larder. I think only the French are sparing with the heat.
The people who are most addicted to chillies are not Mexicans, Sri Lankans or Hungarians, but Serbs. Their consumption of insanely psycho pickled chilli has nothing to do with food, it’s simply part of their rudimentary, sadomasochistic bonding that involves drink, stomach ulcers and recreational pogroms. But as part of a nutritious, balanced and varied diet, nobody gets as hot under the epiglottis as the Sichuan Chinese. Sichuan food makes Mexican taste like sorbet.
There is a new Sichuan restaurant on Frith Street called Bar Shu, which has been given some of the best reviews I’ve ever seen. Paul Levy, the Alf Ramsey of food, sent me a postcard ordering me to go. When I actually found it, there was nothing to indicate that this might be foodie nirvana, one of the greatest restaurants at the heart of the most food-obsessed city in the world — and that is one of the reasons critics will have loved it.
We are all different, we critics. We have individual peccadilloes and prejudices and gastro G-spots. But there are also certain things that draw us together. The moment I walked into Bar Shu, I realised it ticked every box. For a start, it plainly hadn’t had £1m spent on its interior. In fact, it comes from the school of Jordan antidesign: every penny spent has made it uglier.
Then there’s the food, which is an authentic cuisine rooted in geography and history, not a Jabberwocky fusion or personal interpretation. It is not a chain or a copycat — and there’s no black cod or chocolate fondant. Chinese food has been declining in London, and the cheap restaurants across the road in Chinatown are now just rude tourist clip joints; instead, we have the high-camp chinoiserie of Hakkasan and China Tang. But Bar Shu is a rare Sichuan restaurant, not the usual Hong Kong Cantonese. And food doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. China is the nation of the moment. It has power and energy and the zeitgeist.
The final chummy attraction for critics is the menu: it has tons of offal on it. Nothing attracts us like the soft internal bits. If you eat a lot, you end up eating colon, udder and testicles, sucking weird glands and licking lungs. We live for the vibrant vitals without bone or muscle. I know you think it’s disgusting, but actually, it makes us all very, very good in bed. Except Giles Coren, of course.
Bar Shu was busy, and we were initially seated under the pavement in what was once the coal hole. It felt and smelt like being in a Chinese giant’s clog. The Blonde applied the blitzkrieg smile of steel, and we were moved to the first floor, which was much jollier. And we got down to business, starting with slivered pig’s tripe in chilli-oil sauce, and duck rolls with salted duck egg yolk. I think we also had the “numbing and hot dried beef”, and I’m sure we had the “man and wife offal slices” and the “delicious chinese cabbage enlivened with mustard”. Sadly, I don’t remember the “smacked cucumbers”, but we did manage to catch the “boiled beef slices with extremely spicy soup” and the “pockmarked old woman’s bean curd, named after a small lady restaurateur”. I wonder how they told her. “There’s good news and bad news. The good news is, we’ve named a dish after you ... ”
The reason I’m unsure about exactly what we ate is because almost everything looked like disembodied shards of gloop submerged in an oily miasma with a grated topping of chilli. The first mouthful thudded me back in my chair and I emitted a small strangulated, “Wow!” It was almost the last coherent thing I said. After that, a painful numbness spread through my mouth and each new dish was experienced as a mugger’s stab behind the eyes. It seemed as if an unseen hand was roughly injecting Algipan up my nose. My cheeks began to melt and my lips quivered with an involuntary palsy. Sticky sweat ran down my back into pools in my soggy underpants. With a strangulated falsetto, I managed to ask the waiter to bring the specially mixed offal stewed in medieval dragon spit. “Very hot,” said the waiter. “You sure?” Bring it on, China boy, I sighed.
What arrived was another cauldron — an inferno of blood-curdled oil, Bruegelishly bobbing with tripe and lurking flesh, scabbed with chilli. I prodded with my chopsticks and came out with a corner of pig’s liver that collapsed like hot jelly. The whole thing looked like nothing so much as the bucket under a field-hospital operating table. I put a piece of nameless gut in my mouth and it was as if everything that had come before had merely been toying with me. I heard a distant choir, a white light exploded in my head, and I went to a place beyond physical agony, beyond understanding, a place of pure pain outside worldly vanity. I looked down and could see myself, my face glazed with my own juices, my hair standing in sticky fronds, puce eyeballs protruding and revolving like dashboard compasses, my mouth codding with mumbles as I shook and hiccupped with involuntary spasms. All the major junctions of my body oozed with a noisome effluvium.
If this isn’t a good look on you, I don’t recommend Bar Shu as a first-date restaurant. But for critics, this dish was nirvana — like being granted a taste of the godhead — and this restaurant an unctuous chapel in the pantheon of epicureanism.
Bar Shu is extreme eating. Go if you dare. Whether or not it will end up being a success, I can’t say. As Mao said, when he was asked what he thought of the French revolution, it’s still too early to tell. I can, though, offer you a fortune cookie of advice. Confucius, he say: “Put the wet wipes in the fridge before you go to bed.”
BAR SHU
4 stars
28 Frith Street, W1; 020 7287 8822
Daily, noon-10.30pm
5 stars Scorschio!
4 stars Hot favourite
3 stars Have the hots for
2 stars Some like it hot
1 star Hot air
