Time Out says
Thu Apr 15 2010
Where Soho meets Chinatown at Frith Street, there’s now a little cluster of Chinese restaurants that deviate from the Cantonese menu norm. The latest of these is Golden Day, occupying the big site on Shaftesbury Avenue that used to be Chinese Experience.
Superficially not much has changed, except the venue now has a menu boasting dishes attributed to Hunan, the province that lies between Sichuan (to the north) and Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton, to the south).
The food of Hunan is one of the eight great cuisines of China. It’s spicy and chilli-hot, much like the food of Sichuan, and has signature dishes which pop up on Chinese menus the world over.
Golden Day’s laminated menu is many pages long and – very usefully – illustrated with colour photos, but the English translations of dish names are poor, making it hard to distinguish Hunan dishes from the more generic.
At least we could positively identify and order Chairman Mao’s red-braised pork, this version with meltingly tender cubes of pork bellyin a sweet but spicy caramelised sauce. It was the best dish, a very pleasing mix of soft flesh and the firm bite of spring onion.
Hunan is renowned for its pickles, but ‘Xiangxi local pickled vegetables’ was a disappointing heap of bland white cabbage and carrot – no beans, daikon or chilli.
Preserved eggs added interest, their obsidian-like shades of deep green contrasting with roasted red peppers. However, the best preserved eggs should be creamy and served at room temperature; these were cold and a bit hard.
Even though we prepared in advance for our visit by studying Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent book on the food of Hunan, ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook’, we found much of Golden Day’s menu unfathomable. As the staff speak so little useful English, it becomes even murkier unless you read Mandarin and already have a good knowledge of Hunan dishes.
If you’re looking for a Barshu-style revelation of a carefully annotated new cuisine to explore, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re prepared to take a few chances, Golden Day has many intriguing dishes outside the Cantonese norm from ‘pleasantly spicy pigs feet’ to ‘dry pot tea tree mushrooms’.
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