Wun’s Tea Room
23 Greek St, Soho, London W1
Luk Yu is a Hong Kong Tea House that has sat on Stanley Street since 1933. Waiters are clad in formal white coats, as frayed and aged as their wearers, while the dim sum is average, at best. But you don’t go so much for the food as the room, a slice of Colonial Hong Kong long since passed. Walls are part panelled in lacquered wood, with art deco stained-glass windows, and fans whirring lazily overhead. As for getting a seat on the ground floor… forget it. That’s solely reserved for members of Hong Kong’s oldest, and most esteemed, families.
There’s another place, Cha’s Diner, this time in Shanghai’s French Concession, a meticulous recreation of a Sixties Hong Kong cha canting, or cheap tea restaurant. A rather less formal younger brother to the likes of Luk Yu. With its stained-glass panels, swift service, mosaic floor, plastic floral plates and jukebox banging out jaunty Sixties Cantonese hits, the room is eternally packed. Its menu takes in various soy milks, fried rice, sandwiches, weak tea and Chinese beer. Stays open late too.
Wun’s Tea Room. Downstairs is a speakeasy tearoom which, with its crimson velvet drapes and emerald neon glow, crosses Wong Kar-Wai with David Lynch
Both places remind me of Wun’s Tea Room, rather nearer to home, on the corner of Old Compton and Greek streets in Soho. Downstairs is a speakeasy tearoom which, with its crimson velvet drapes and emerald neon glow, crosses Wong Kar-Wai with David Lynch. But we sit upstairs, where mint green dominates – on the mosaic floor, artfully aged wall, waitresses’ dresses and the hanging baskets festooned with trailing leaves. Not so much kitsch as effortlessly cool. A jukebox trills with Cantonese versions of Hawaii 5-0, while the menu, in the form of a newspaper, is filled with cocktails, beers, teas and a dangerous array of baijiu. Ah, baijiu. I once seriously over-indulged on this mainly sorghum-based spirit in Chengdu. Handle with extreme care. There’s also whisky, gin, wine and home-made liqueurs. All of them proudly Chinese.
I’m with friend and restaurateur Russell Norman, who loves the font and the unforced elegance of the place. And the food too. We fill in our order form (nothing steamed here) and eat salty, chilli-dusted peanuts with crisp slivers of dried fish that crunch and burn and leave the mouth a-tingle. Then ‘HK Wind Shelter’, whole whitebait, lightly battered and hidden among a crunchy mess of golden deep-fried garlic, dried chillies and tiny rings of fresh spring onion (below). The flavours are suitably robust, no-nonsense, bar-snack Cantonese.
There are delicate triangles of creamy tofu in a crisp shell, dipped into sharp vinegar, and a crisp, fresh peanut, red onion, fried noodle salad. Which offers brisk relief from the bubbling wok. Satay beef noodles (not dissimilar to Super Noodles) wallow in a rich, coconut-heavy gravy, and are topped with a frilly edged fried egg, while sticky, chewy claypot rice, the pot searing hot, comes studded with slippery mushrooms and soft chunks of pumpkin. Pure Cantonese comfort.
‘HK Wind Shelter’, whole whitebait, lightly battered and hidden among a crunchy mess of golden deep-fried garlic, dried chillies and tiny rings of fresh spring onion
Then there’s the Iberico char siu, of which much has already been written. It is to the usual roast pork what jade is to green glass. Coated in sugar, this is both sweet and savoury, chewy and tender, and lavishly, lasciviously fatty. You can’t stop eating the stuff, and too much is simply not enough. I go back again a few days later, just for one more plate. Washed down with a pot of clean, grassy Sichuan green tea.
The only discordant note is a baijiu bloody Mary with pickle juice, tomato purée and dill bitters. I only manage one sip. That aside, Wun’s Tea Room is a blast. For the most part, a joyous glimpse of a lesser known part of this great regional cuisine. It’s Cantonese, Jin, but not as we know it.
About £25 per head