Hutong at the Shard - review

It was on Sunday evening that my friend told me he hated dim sum. I was thrilled, having booked Hutong at the Shard for his belated birthday lunch the following day.  He lives in Sydney now, so I thought we could be London tourists and go and look at the old city from a new height. But he hates dim sum, Monday dawned foggy and an hour before we met I received a text saying 'don't wear pink', which I took as forewarning that he would be. A great start all round.

 

I met the fuschia dream on the 32nd floor of the Shard and had a cocktail made from gin and dragon fruit, the seeds of which have the same terrifying potential as those of poppies for cementing themselves to the gaps between your teeth, as it turns out.  He had something metro in a champagne flute.

 

We sat in the black lacquered Hutong and wondered why everyone else was there. There were no business lunches, or children, or American tourists, but it was full. We had time on our side and so went for the tasting menu and a bottle of albariño.  In the recesses of my gin-dimmed mind I remembered reading something about Spanish wines going with Chinese food. It isn’t the sort of place for a beer and some prawn crackers.

 

The first things we ate were chilled razor clams with a lemongrassy dressing. Razor clams look disturbingly anatomical but were very good; like white meat rather than fish. Raw scallops were fresh and sweet but slightly underwhelming – I often think they’re better with the pizzazz of a ceviche or fried in butter (obviously) than as sashimi.

 

Vegetable spring rolls were forgettable, but prawns with jasmine tea leaves were exceptional. Neither of us had ever eaten better prawns, and one of us is from Australia where all they do is put shrimp on the barbie. They were huge and sweet and bouncy.

 

The Red Lantern is Hutong's signature dish; a huge bowl filled with baked, deep red Sichuan chillies, rustling like paper, amongst which you poked your chopsticks to find big chunks of spicy, crunchy soft shell crab.  At the end, there were little crispy bits left at the bottom of the bowl that tasted like the most incredible kettle chips ever.  Which is I’m sure what they were going for.  A huge plate of green beans with spicy minced pork was delicious, as were lamb ribs with a garlic dipping sauce, although these last were quite unexpectedly fatty, like pork belly.

 

They had no cheesecake, which was meant to be the pudding, so we substituted it for a pomelo soup and a squishy thing in a peanut coating. When I asked what it was, presuming it wasn’t actually an eyeball covered in nuts as I had queasily assumed, I was told it was a gelatinous starch. So there you go. The middle was very black. It didn’t taste of much. The pomelo soup was very fruity, but made my teeth yellow which really set off the dragon fruit seeds from earlier.

 

We sat and waited for the fog to dissipate and darkness to descend. Luckily it started doing that at about 4pm, so we had to plenty of time to go through the cocktail list in the main bar.  Someone has been at the menu with a ‘mad hatter’s tea party’ attitude – there were some weird and wonderful things in those drinks. Some good (earl grey air), some bad (oregano) and some ugly (blue cheese stuffed grapes). Still, they were all delicious and London twinkled around us in the darkness as we pointed out landmarks at least one of us didn't know the names of, and caught up on 6 months of different hemispherical living.

 

Recounting the day’s events at his leaving dinner later in the week, my friend was moved to suggest that the spicy scotch egg he’d ordered as a joke, three sheets to the wind in a pub on Old Broad Street later that evening, was the best thing he’d eaten that day. There’s gratitude for you.