Tom Doorleyreviews Yauatcha, London
Enthusing about seakale a while back, I said I had never seen it on an Irish menu. Since then I have revelled in the stuff at Ballymaloe, and I can report that it also features on the menus of several of the grander Hidden Ireland houses. The owner of one of these confided to me that he thought seakale "far too good for the guests. I hang around the kitchen and scoff what they leave on their plates".
It was Richard Corrigan who introduced me to seakale many years ago at Lindsay House, and he has got me to taste a lot of stuff in the meantime that I might otherwise have avoided. Things such as ox heart with gremolata and cow heel. So it was a pleasure to swap roles a while back and introduce him to steamed chicken feet at Yauatcha in Soho, London. He liked them a lot and, always razor sharp in his assessment of food, exclaimed: "Chinese trotters!" Which is as good a description as you can get.
Anyway, there I was in Yauatcha the other day with someone else, who pointed out that Matthew Mellon was at the next table. Being the sort of chap who knows these things, he explained that Mellon, while being heir to some £2 billion, has to get by on a mere £1 million a year. "In that set," muttered my friend, "a million is like being on the dole."
Anyway, Yauatcha is the kind of dim sum restaurant that attracts people who don't have to try parking on Bond Street because they have someone to keep the Maserati Quattroporte's engine running. And a lot of ordinary media mortals eat there, too. I reckon less than one in 10 of the men wears a tie.
Like Hakkasan, Alan Yau's other restaurant, Yauatcha has a Michelin star, and I can see why. The service is superb, and the food is both very good indeed and, more importantly from Michelin's point of view, utterly consistent. And the fit-out - clever lighting, low tables, no fussiness and lots of blue glass - must have cost, oh, probably more than an average house in south Dublin.
We lunched lightly but exquisitely, kicking off with a return visit to the chicken feet, which came in a bamboo steamer and were thoroughly coated in a spicy black bean sauce. They were a gelatinous delight from which the myriad tiny bones (which make this a difficult dish to eat with any semblance of elegance) could not detract.
My favourite dim sum here is prawn and beancurd cheung fun. In fact, some day I'm going to go in and just keep ordering it until I want no more. But it would take quite a while.
The prawn is mixed with enoki mushroom slivers and wrapped in a beancurd skin, which is very slightly leathery, and then the whole lot is wrapped in a slippery, glutinous outside layer and served with a light, delicate soya sauce. The contrast of textures is just brilliant while the flavours, with a smoky background note, are superb.
By contrast, Hong Kong choi sum (one of the dearer dishes, at £7.50/€11) was poor. This tender young brassica is, in a sense, the Chinese equivalent of seakale and asparagus.
The version I ate in Hong Kong was a revelation - so much so that I am trying to grow some in Co Cork. But Yauatacha's was tough, slightly stringy and lacking in flavour. Not good enough at this price. We were more than compensated, however, by the arrival of a couple of baked venison puffs made from that sweetish, bready Chinese pastry, filled with a wickedly intense, dark dollop of long-cooked, tender venison, baked until brown. This is worth travelling for.
We should have been full at this stage - especially having shared a dish of hand-pulled noodles with intensely savoury shimeji mushrooms - but we could not resist ordering salt-and-chilli squid, which was as good as it gets. The bill came to £81.94 (€120), including three beers each, two espressos and a bottle of Voss water, which is fairly keen value for food of this standard in a place such as London. But there is no excuse for including service and then leaving the gratuity line open. Yauatacha does this all the time, so just decline the opportunity of making a charitable donation.
• Yauatcha, 15 Broadwick Street, London W1, 00-44-207-4948888
Wine choice
I tend to avoid wine in Chinese restaurants, so on this occasion I greatly enjoyed the malty, fresh Japanese Yebisu beer (£3.80/€5.50). Yauatcha's list is eccentric in some respects. There are 17 pink Champagnes (Gosset Grand Rosé is lovely at £79/€115.56) and only three white.