From breakfast with love

The best chat up line I’ve ever heard is ‘my chef does a great breakfast’.  The only reason it didn’t work was because I was young and I thought I wasn’t that type of girl.  In fact, it remains true that I don’t eat breakfast, but for James Bond I can make an exception.

There's a new Bond book in town and it starts with Bond having breakfast at the Dorchester, so the Dorchester decided to host 'Bond's breakfast', and got William Boyd in to sign copies of his book. My uncle procured four tickets but was being a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and said he couldn’t deal with three women at breakfast so I had to bring a boy, even though breakfast is normally a ‘date number three’ kind of thing, if that. I called up an old faithful (which sort of sounds like I took a dog) and off we went. 

Bond’s breakfast was half a dozen rashers of bacon and four eggs, scrambled.  There was a muesli and yoghurt option, which doesn’t really deserve any more of my time, and an omelette (Bond does eat them quite a lot – one of his favourite suppers is an omelette fines herbes), which I would have ordered but for the fact I wanted to see if I actually could eat six pieces of bacon and four eggs. It’s the same mentality that has led to me see how many pizza crusts I can fit in my mouth at a dinner where we were being introduced to a friend’s new girlfriend for the first time.

We ordered vesper martinis and were told the bar wasn’t open yet which was slightly embarrassing, or would have been if it hadn't been a WWJBD day.  They arrived anyway and were perfectly ice sharp, although I would note that they don't go down easily at 10am.

We were so involved in drinking and chatting and laughing and soaking up the atmosphere and all the other things that people do over breakfast (bearing in mind at least two of us are related) that we ordered late and our food arrived moments before William Boyd got up to read some of the book and kindly answer questions. Well. Dilemma. Do you eat through it, your fork squealing across the china in the dead silence of the velvet room as thirty pairs of eyes swivel, disapprovingly, in the direction of the table who are, clearly, half cut? No, probably not. James wouldn't have done it either; a low profile being essential in his line of work. So we waited, politely, as Boyd eloquently answered some interesting (and some fairly stupid) questions, and when he had finished I'd accidentally eaten six rashers of deliciously crisp bacon with my fingers and everyone's eggs were cold.

Chalk this up as yet another incredibly useful food review. 

Guo Yue's restaurant club

I never really eat ‘Chinese’ food.  If we ever went to a Chinese restaurant as children, my sisters and I would just sit at the end of the table munching away on prawn crackers and seaweed, leaving little crispy bits of green straw scattered over the table all around our plates, whilst the adults drank Tsingtao and ate weird, translucent, floppy things and talked about crumbling marriages.

 

Later on, it was a university takeaway staple.  The night after we’d drunk 800 alcopops, snogged people we hated and posted every single moment of the evening onto facebook in a epically detailed album of 60+ photos, all with their own captions (and I was so STRESSED all the time! I had so much to do! I was going to have a breakdown with the amount of work I did!), three of us would decant plastic containers of sweet and sour or chicken in black bean sauce and sit on the floor of one of our rooms, watching a gentle film. I’d never had sweet and sour chicken before university. I’d also never seen curry house rice with all the different coloured bits, or been called stupid so many times during one supervision that I’d snapped a pen in half and thrown it into a fireplace, threateningly (Golden Age of French Theatre my ass), but those are different stories.

 

Of course, this is because what I was eating (not the pen bit, the Chinese food bit) was a blanket English bastardisation of a thousand different culinary traditions.  But I didn’t know that.  The upshot is, it doesn’t really excite me, and whenever I read about a new place specialising in Sichaun spiced oiled pork belly, or Cantonese steamed buns, or duck gizzard skewers from somewhere else, all of which are delicious and different and interesting, I just think ‘sweet orange gloop’ and then ‘meh’. This happened most recently at Flesh & Buns, but I’m blaming that on the fact it was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think so forgot I wasn’t going to be interested. And then I went somewhere that changed my mind.

 

My godmother hovers in the background of these pages, always good for a cocktail or a fun evening out, but also a very good cook in her own right, and someone who is really interested in food to boot.  She makes spanakopita from scratch on weeknights, and she went on a course to learn how to make dim sum dumplings. That’s the kind of person she is.

 

The man who ran her dumpling course is called Guo Yue, and he plays the Chinese flute well enough to have a Wikipedia entry on the same (I promise I didn’t write it). He does occasional restaurant nights with set menus that he emails his contact list about in advance, and they are always fully booked. I can’t improve on the descriptions in the actual menu he emailed everyone ahead of the dinner we went to, in a small restaurant on Cleveland Street a few weeks ago.  It is beautiful. If this isn’t evocative of a time, place and culture ‘other’, I don’t know what is.  Everyone sat with strangers and shared everything out from plates in the middle of the table, Guo Yue played a flute made of jade and passed round rice wine. It was out of this world.

 

                                                                                                                               STARTERS

A PLATTER OF WU LONG TEA SMOKED DUCK, PAPER PRAWN ROLLS, CRISPY SALMON WITH YUE'S SPECIALLY MADE SAUCE 

                                                      HONEY GLAZED CHINESE WILD MUSHROOMS SLOW COOKED WITH ONE STAR ANISE AND RICE WINE

                                                    STEAMED AUBERGINE WITH FRESH GREEN AND RED CHILLIS, SESAME SEED PASTE AND FRESH CORIANDER

                                                                               TENDER BONELESS CHICKEN COOKED IN SICHUAN AROMATIC CHILLI SAUCE

                                                                                                                 MAIN COURES

FRESH TIGER PRAWNS COOKED IN CHINESE RICE WINE WITH WILD CHINESE GARLIC SHOOTS

                                                              BEEF COOKED IN A HOT POT WITH FRESH GINGER, SPRING ONION AND GREEN JADE MANGE TOUT

STEAMED LEMON SOLE (OR SEA BASS) WITH A VERY SPECIAL CHILLI BEEN PASTE, SPRING ONION AND RED BERRY

                                                        SILKY WOOD EAR, FRESH BAMBOO & VERY THINLY SHREDDED PORK COOKED IN MANY DIFFERENT INGREDIENTS

                                                                                             (THE NAME OF THIS DISH IS PERFUMED SILKY PORK)

                                                                   ONE OF THE DISHES I ATE THE MOST WHEN I WENT BACK TO CHINA AND WHEN I LIVED IN CHINA

                                                                       CHOY SUM COOKED IN A SPECIAL WAY WITH FRESH GINGER AND GARLIC AND RICE WINE

                                                                                              LIGHTLY COOKED CHINESE SILK MELON WITH LILY FLOWER

                                                                                                                        FRESH FRUITS AND CHINESE TEA