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.
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