That Chinese food can be as refined and sophisticated as anything from across the Channel shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the British, who as recently as 1997 were governing the home of Chinese fine dining, Hong Kong. But the Chinese food in London historically lagged dismally behind their possession in the South China Sea.

For years, in many minds the symbol of sophisticated Chinese dining in London was Hakkasan, kym [the Chinese restaurant/nightclub] that was more famous for the celebrity approved scene than its food.

In many ways, the story of A. Wong is the larger story of the Chinese community in London. Chef and founder Andrew Wong is a third-generation Londoner, and third-generation hospitality worker.

“I have been immersed in the world of restaurants since childhood,” Wong says. “My grandfather, who moved to London as a Chinese refugee, owned pubs in the East End and a restaurant in Chinatown. In 1985, my parents opened a Cantonese restaurant, Kym’s in Pimlico, named after my grandmother.”

Today, A. Wong stands where Wong’s parents’ restaurant used to operate, but the food he serves is a world away.

“My parent’s restaurant used to serve up a primarily Cantonese menu, the type of food that British people expect from a typical Chinese restaurant,” Wong says. “So lots of dishes in bright orange sauces. Nothing wrong with that at all – the restaurant was always full. Many people assume the A in A. Wong stands for Andrew, but it’s actually a nod to my parents, Albert and Annie.”

Wong wanted to accomplish two things with his new restaurant: to show diners that Chinese food could be just as refined and sophisticated as anything coming out of Western kitchens, and to show that there was a world of Chinese cuisine outside typical Cantonese fare.

“Chinese cuisine is so much more diverse than a lot of people realise, and that’s what I wanted to show people through my menu at A. Wong,” he says. “We serve dishes from across the whole of China, not just one region. We wanted to celebrate all of Chinese cuisine and really showcase everything China has to offer.”

To that end, he created his now famous “Taste of China” tasting menu, bringing diners on a culinary tour through the greatest hits of Chinese regional cuisine, all reimagined by himself – think dishes such as Shaanxi pulled lamb “burger” with Xinjiang pomegranate salad; soy chicken, ginger oil and Osetra caviar wrap; and char sui with grated foie gras.

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The response to A. Wong has been extraordinary. Reservations have become a hot commodity and, in a widely shared review, Guardian food critic Jay Rayner gushed that A. Wong’s custard bun was “the single best dessert available right now in London, or, for that matter, anywhere else”. Though Wong is at the forefront of a new generation of Chinese cuisine in London, he is also a fierce defender of that cuisine’s past. He takes umbrage with the notion that London’s Chinese food historically lagged behind that of other global cities.

“Around the world, I think the British Chinese food scene is better than a lot of other places, including New York, some parts of Canada and most of Europe.”

While that opinion would have seemed – at the very least – eccentric even a decade ago, today Wong might just have a point. And it’s not just in the high-end space that Chinese cuisine is flourishing.

The make-up of London’s Chinese community is changing, and alongside multi-generational Chinese Londoners are more recent immigrants from all over China, who brought with them a hunger for the food of their birthplaces.

That was the experience of Tongtong Ren, who, with her friend, Peiran Gong, opened Chinese Laundry in 2015. Ren was born in Hubei, a landlocked province in central China, and moved to Beijing and then Shanghai – where she met and became friends with Gong – before they both moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art.

The friends were obsessed with food, and would routinely scour London’s markets for fresh ingredients to cook in the flat they shared, but they missed the flavours of home. Some of Ren’s earliest memories were of her “grandma making pickles, wind-drying sausages, and making fermented stuff. I was a fat kid because I grew up with her, and her food was just too good to resist. My mum was always stopping me from eating.”

In their restaurant, the duo wanted to pay homage to their food memories and create flavours that were then mostly impossible to find in London.

“What we are cooking is really a personal selection of dishes we like from our food memories, the Chinese food that we’ve eaten for the first 20 years of our lives,” Ren says. “Sometimes we’d put what we really wanted to eat on the menu – the food we’re craving ourselves as Chinese living far away from our homeland.”

Their original restaurant was gutted by fire in 2017 but has been reborn as a three-day-a-week, six-month residency at The Mountgrove Bothy, until they are ready to move back into a more permanent home.

The food coming out of the Chinese Laundry’s kitchen was immediately popular with London’s hip foodies. It does not hurt that the values so highly held in modern urban gastronomy – seasonal, local ingredients, pickling and preservation in all its forms – are also essential to the traditional Chinese cuisine they wanted to recreate.

Like so many recent immigrants to London, the pair are young and creative, eagerly putting their spin on the classics to create their own unique dishes such as mapo calf liver, and pork belly and onion dumplings.

Ren says of the dining scene in London, where once she struggled to satisfy her cravings for the taste of home: “It is gradually changing, and we see more younger generations of Chinese chefs are starting to celebrate their own food culture. Also, interestingly, a lot of Western chef friends we know in London are extremely interested in Chinese cooking, which makes the Chinese food scene in London even more dynamic.”

Alongside new and innovative Chinese offerings are a slew of simpler restaurants run by recent immigrants serving humble Chinese home cooking at a level previously unheard of in the city. One of Ren’s favourites is Dilara, which she says looks like a Turkish restaurant but is a Xinjiang restaurant serving up Uygur cuisine.

“I go there and eat the big plate chicken and hand pulled noodles,” she says. “Also the rice cooked with lamb fat and dried apricots.”

Another Xinjiang restaurant, Silk Road, has also proven a hit. Both Wong and Ren have helped usher in a new era in Chinese dining, but they balk at the term that most food writers have used to describe it: authentic.

“It’s impossible to be authentic outside the region where the food originated, as the weather, water and the ingredient are just totally different,” Ren says. “Anything else is an interpretation, a creation. So far, I have not eaten any authentic Hunanese cuisine outside Hunan, even in Beijing or Shanghai.”

Wong agrees. “Authenticity actually means very little, because the term in itself implies things don’t change, and within cuisine that’s obviously not the case. People don’t realise that cuisine evolves and changes all the time. Therefore, the term authenticity will change as well.”

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It certainly seems that Chinese food is beginning to take its place among London’s trendiest cuisines. And Londoners so far have proved hungry for it … for the most part.

“Chicken feet is one dish that hasn’t gone down well,” Wong says. “Londoners are happy to try most stuff,” Ren says.

But she is surprised that “they find certain textures weird – like glutinous rice balls, intestines, and congee. That’s something hard for me to get.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: C a p i tal dines o ut on a t a s tef ul r e v o l u t i on

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