YMing35-36 Greek Street, W1; 020 7734 2721Mon-Sat, noon-11.45pmI remember Chinatown when it was Chinahamlet. The inscrutable, sad and intrepid immigrants from Hong Kong, heads down in the steam and neon light of a gloomy, coal-gas stinky London. Those hanging chains of dribbling red ducks were the most exotic food things I’d ever seen, as fascinating as Selfridges’ Christmas windows. The little restaurants south of Shaftesbury Avenue and north of Leicester Square had a whiff of tong menace about them. Furious little men with dextrous cleavers. They were frequented by other chefs and waiters from the West End, and tweedy Soho intellectuals — skinny, pale men with unmanageable hair and horny glasses, awkwardly chatting up girls in flat shoes with kohl-black eyes and Camus on their laps.
Chinese restaurants were bohemian louche lunches before liaisons, the dinner of mistresses. Chinese was the first ethnic food most of us ever ate: lemon chicken in cornflower citrus semen sauce, the glottal assault of sweet and sour porky gristle at a time when pineapple was still a luxury ingredient.
Silently, the Chinese moved into every town and village in the country, opening Pagoda and Lotus takeaways in foul-mouthed, soot-black, angry, stupid, back-to-back streets. Whenever I came across them in the grim North, I wondered at their fortitude, the inner resolve and the flickering comfort of some grand dream that sustained them in these grassless, thankless, vicious places. Putting up with drunken vileness, thick-tongued racism, uncaring slurping, the insistence on chips and forks and ketchup. The tiny margins made on using cuts of pig, lamb and chicken the English didn’t deign to bother with. The tedious, relentless jokes about cats and alsatians. And the grinding, chilly, thankless loneliness of it. There should be a huge statue on the M1, like the Angel of the North; it should be to the Unknown Chinaman, the silent, uncomplaining brigade of foodie missionaries.
I walked through Chinatown last week for the first time in a year or so. It’s a tourist feature now, and a multicultural boast, with illuminated Chinese-style gates and pictogram street signs and good-luck dogs. And there are still dozens of restaurants, ruby ducks hanging in the windows and furious men wielding cleavers. But there are also streams of Chinese schoolchildren, teenagers now, talking with London accents and dressed in baggy ghetto gear. The restaurants are no longer full of adventurous bohemians and exhausted chefs, but the provincial young up for a night’s clubbing or 10-quid-a-day tourists in town for Chitty Chitty Lion King.
I’ve never known where to eat in Chinatown. If I ever do stumble on a good meal, I forget where it is, and by the time I go back, it’s called something else. I phoned other critics to ask for their recommendations. None could give me any.
Chinatown has become pretty much like the rest of the West End: a cheap fuel stop between drink and drugs. It’s a shame (but perhaps not for the Chinese). A couple of years ago, when Blooms, the last Jewish restaurant in the East End, was shut down by the rabbis, there were wails of sorrow: 100 years of history and culture come to an end. But the truth was that the Jewish community had moved on to more salubrious burghs. They got professions in place of jobs. Catering is the business of first-generation immigrants. Cypriots, Maltese, Jews, Bengalis, Lebanese have all hocked everything to sell cheap food so that their kids won’t have to.
Perhaps the demise of Chinatown is a credit to the Chinese community that’s moving on. On the other hand, it may also be all we deserve. We refuse to see Chinese food as anything more than cheap. In the end, if there’s no encouragement, ethnic restaurants will serve what they can get away with.
The popular prejudices about Chinky takeaways make it difficult to improve the quality and sophistication of the dishes, or to charge more. It’s far easier to take your Peking Pagoda and turn it into the Bangkok Banyan. Thai food has a chic cachet, a summer-holiday honeymoon romance. So hundreds of Hong Kong Cantonese became Siamese overnight. Phuket? Why not? Most Indian restaurants are run by Bangladeshis, and most Greek restaurants by Turkish Cypriots, and most sushi outside Japan is made by Koreans.
The immigrant cook didn’t come here to improve or educate us, just to make money. And perhaps having to pretend to be someone you’re not is all part of the diaspora experience. If we’re stupid enough to pay more for a Thai spring roll than a Chinese one, more fool us. But it’s still a shame almost every wave of immigration has been a missed opportunity. We only consider it a success when they’re just like us. But what’s so great about that? The joy of immigrants is their difference; it’s not when they’ve been bullied, ridiculed and ignored into eating Pop Tarts, wearing iPods and talking estuary.
I finally settled on YMing, north of Shaftesbury Avenue, in Greek Street. It’s a comfortable, middle-market Chinese. The only things hanging in the window are the curtains. I took Nick Allot. “Oh, it’s the Minge,” he exclaimed. “We came here every week when rehearsing Les Mis.” (He’s a theatrical.) The menu is familiar, nay predictable, and too long, but priced reasonably, by which I mean expensively enough for it not to be worrying. If you ’re in need of a West End Chinese, you could do a lot worse, although sadly you can’t do much better.
It’s in the nature of restaurant reviewing that just when you get complacent, when you assume nothing is going to jump up and bite your lip or pump your mouth with a wild choking ardour, it does. You know that the great failing of all restaurants east of Cairo is pudding. The Orientals, in particular, are rubbish at the dessert trolley. So when I was offered the menu, I only took it from habit. But there it was (I could so easily have missed it): deep-fried Mars Bar.
There is assimilation and there’s impersonation. I’ve had the original in Glasgow chippies: thick, oily, McVile. But here, fried in small nuggets in light Chinese batter, it was a proper confection, not a sweetie torture — delicious, melting and perfect with ice cream. My recommendation is a swift hot and sour soup, then double afters: a real treat. Can you still get Treets? “Melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” That was the slogan, and how weird was that? Only the English could sell food whose prime virtue is that it’s not messy.
This week's star rating guide:
Storming
Presuming
Middling
Steaming
Bombing
