Jay Rayner on restaurantsFoodReviewHigh prices and a peppercorn overload that makes your lips vibrate should be a deterrent. But Duck & Rice is a gem
90 Berwick Street, London W1 (020 3327 7888). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £110
For a moment I didn’t want to step inside Alan Yau’s new “Chinese gastropub”. I wanted to treat it like that beautiful girl I had the hots for in my first year at university. I just wanted to stand and stare. I didn’t want to ruin the illusion of unquestioned beauty by attempting to get involved.
It was once a building of such extreme ugliness even its architect couldn’t have loved it. The conversion really is that good. The heavy front walls, in bricks the colour of polluted mud, have been replaced by sails of leaded windows, with geometric patterns picked out from the oddly shaped panes. Through the door, lined up like a very welcoming committee, are the curves of shiny copper-coloured beer vats for the various pilsners on draught. The upstairs dining room, reached by a spiral staircase, hangs out over the ground floor. Through the windows can be glimpsed the huge blue and white ceramic wall panels, like blow-ups of willow pattern, which bring light into the sexily down-lit space. This stretch of London’s Berwick Street has never been one of Soho’s loveliest. Now it boasts a jewel.
It’s an expression of money, in two floors of glass and brass and leading. But then Yau, who founded Wagamama and Busaba Eathai, has never been one to stint. He doesn’t always succeed; his Pan-Asian café Naamyaa has already gone from Islington. But when he gets it right he gets it very right. Yauatcha both lifted the quality of dim sum in London, and made eating Chinese food sexy and glamorous, as did Hakkasan. He sold them both for a substantial sum and they are now on their way to becoming a global brand.
Amusingly, Duck & Rice is located right next door to Yauatcha. It can’t help but feel like Yau is making a point: that when it comes to making Asian food a serious event he’s still the man. For all the brass front it’s a reasonable claim. Except that the Chinese restaurant sector has moved on since he opened Yauatcha and Hakkasan more than a decade ago. Back then nearby Chinatown was where appetite went to die. Now it’s full of little stars. This presents him with a genuine challenge.
Yau has met it with idiosyncrasy. The building was once a pub and, with his tongue so far in his cheek it’s practically out his ear hole, he’s claiming it still is. Downstairs there is indeed a thrilling list of ales and pilsners, stouts and porters, wheat and fruit beers. There is even a beer cocktail list, which is slightly worrying. Beer negroni, anyone?
Upstairs houses the main menu. It is long and, using the term politely, inclusive. Among the snacks, for example, there’s a sparkling dish of cashew nuts seemingly dry fried with fresh chilli, crisped shallots and salt until the natural oils run. It is a big bowl of toastiness and nuttiness. Weirdly, there’s also a plate of grilled Ibérico jamón, 70g for £12.50. Imagine someone had gifted you a kilo of prime Spanish ham and you’d grown bored of eating the stuff. You might, indulgently, do this with it. Think shards of the best, oily, crispy bacon.
Across two meals I try some very good things, many of them taking banal Chinese takeaway standards and turning them into serious conversation pieces. The prawn sesame toast is the best I have ever tried, the butch minced prawn heaped so pillowlike on to the toast you don’t know whether to eat it or have a nap on it. The take on crispy shredded beef makes every other version feel like a tragic failure. Here the meat is so crisp it shatters gloriously under the teeth. It comes with dark-toasted hunks of chilli for deep caramel flavours and orange zest for brightness, plus fresh orange segments for light and shade.
Chicken in black bean sauce is a slab of boned-out and roasted bird under a bright, fresh sauce that is a transatlantic flight from the sludgy, salty hit the title usually references. (Greens with black bean sauce and mackerel are similarly thrilling.) A beef noodle soup is made with immense care and precision: rustic soft noodles, long-braised beef, a stock of uncommon depth and clarity. I doubt you will find a better beef noodle soup in London. I also love the sticky jasmine-smoked pork ribs.
But other things make me scratch my head, and it’s more over price than quality. For example the har gau – steamed shrimp dumplings – are as good as those at Yauatcha next door. They are also 90p more expensive than at Yauatcha next door. There are starker comparisons. Naturally, given the restaurant’s name, they go big on duck, both crispy with pancakes and in the roasted Cantonese style with dark, lacquered skin. There are notes on the family farm the happy animals come from. Lucky ducks. The roasted duck is a creditable version. But it’s £24 a half. There’s a place on Gerrard Street that does it a little better, where half a duck is £12.50.
Similarly, they serve chilli Sichuan chicken, in which nuggets of deep-fried bird are buried amid heaps of dry red chilli with Sichuan peppercorns, spring onions and garlic. The numbing peppercorns are a little overwhelming – my lips were vibrating – but it’s still a good version. It cost £16.50. I know a place five minutes’ walk away on Charing Cross Road which does a bigger portion of the same dish for just under £9.
God, but I’m bloody annoying aren’t I, banging on about my smarty-pants knowledge of London’s Chinese restaurants? That we should all have the time to acquire such vital intelligence. This, I think, is the point of Duck & Rice. Yes, you could seek out versions of these dishes elsewhere (see my extended recommendations in News Bites, below). Many might be cheaper. Some might even be slightly better. But doing so is difficult and despite all the advances in recent years, too many of Chinatown’s restaurants aren’t attractive places to visit. What’s more, all too often they remain plagued by brusque, unengaged and brittle service.
At Duck and Rice you pay for a beautiful room, nice staff and a sense that it’s worth getting dressed up for. Yes, you pay rather a lot, but if you can afford it, that expense is rewarded. I expect to see more outposts of Duck & Rice coming along shortly.
Jay’s news bites
And so to your DIY Duck and Rice dish list for London’s Chinatown. For prawn dumplings at £6, visit Dumplings Legend, at 15 – 16 Gerrard Street. Do not miss their Xiao Long Bao, soupy dumplings with a filling held in liquid broth that dribbles down your chin if not eaten right. For brilliant Cantonese duck (and other roasted meats) go to Four Seasons at 12 Gerrard Street. Always order ‘bone in’. It’s £12.50 per half. The chilli chicken dish can be found at Red n Hot, a rough and ready Sichuan place at 59 Charing Cross Road, where hot pots are the speciality. A huge portion of chicken in red chillies is only £8.80.
Some customers complain about chefs having their name above the door but not actually being on site all the time. Respect, then, to Marco Pierre White who has decided to tell his customers exactly when he’s there. In the last week of May Marco toured his 19 strong group of New York Italians and steakhouses, offering to join you for dinner in his own restaurant at £45 head. Generous man. Mpwrestaurants.co.uk
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