Inventions Of The 1950 S

Chinese food

IN ADDITION to the Bagehot column, I have a brief article in the Britain section this week, looking at a cheering London trend: the emergence of a growing number of seriously tasty Chinese restaurants. Long, long ago, Bagehot lived in Beijing for a few years, and the hunt for real Chinese food—rather than the gloopified, muted inventions found in most Chinese restaurants in the West—remains something of an obsession.

A decade or 15 years ago, London's Chinatown was a hard place to find good food. There were some restaurants with some more authentic Cantonese dishes on their Chinese-language menus, but if your addiction was (like mine) for Sichuan or northern food, you were mostly out of luck.

Returning to Britain last summer, I was thus startled and happy to learn about a band of newcomers who were offering authentic food, some of it in Chinatown itself. The causes are straightforward: a growing number of mainland Chinese students and businessmen in London, and a growing number of British diners who have travelled around China and tasted the real thing. Chinese restaurateurs are pragmatists: many of the families operating in Chinatown have been there since the 1950s and 1960s, and they long ago learned that Westerners liked meat without bones, sweet sauces and nothing too spicy. Traditionally, Chinese diners do not care very much for fancy decor or a romantic atmosphere: the cooking is the thing, and indeed bright lights are a bonus so that you can see that the chef is using fresh, quality ingredients. The resulting compromise was often an unhappy one: brightly-lit restaurants without much style, offering almost identical choices of boring food and competing with each other on price.

Now a new generation of restaurant-owners, often the British-born children of those pioneering Hong Kong families, are trying to bridge the gap between West and East in a different way. They are offering much more authentic food, in carefully-designed settings that draw on fashionable styles like the rustic inn look made popular in Taiwan (think grey stone walls, heavy wooden stools and tables, farm implements on the walls), traditional tea houses, trendy "bubble tea" cafes or sleek Hong Kong dim sum places that would not look out of place in Central.

The news is not all sunny. Just at the moment that good cooking has never been easier to find in Chinatown, many of the old restaurants are struggling to survive. Rents are rising, while the mass trade from tour groups or late-night drinkers is sharply down. Local restaurant owners grumble a lot about ever-tougher parking rules: I am not sure I have much sympathy—businesses in the very centre of the West End should not be looking for customers to come to them by car. I have a lot more sympathy with gripes about ever-tougher visa rules, that make it especially hard to recruit top chefs from the Chinese mainland. The local business association is deeply worried about an influx of betting shops and casinos over the last two or three years. Two have recently replaced a restaurant and a pub on the main drag, Gerrard Street, and many more would spell trouble.

jayjagdeesh: inventions on 1950;s

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The 1950s

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