Restaurants

By Charmaine Mok

There’s something conspiratorial about the whole thing. Just when you thought the Chinatown dining scene was torpid, two outstanding restaurants – first Baozi Inn, and now Leong’s Legends, both boasting relatively unknown regional cooking – burst on to the scene with the stealth and cunning of bandits. Which, if you think about it, is a fitting metaphor for the title of this Taiwanese newcomer.

The name refers to the popular classical Chinese novel ‘The Water Margin’, which revolves around the rebel Song Jiang and his 107 comrades (sometimes referred to as ‘Liang’s legends’) who rise up against a corrupt government during the Song dynasty, while taking refuge on Mount Liang (aka Leong).

Appropriately, the decor seems to pay homage to the ancient street-side teahouses popular with both heroes and vagabonds in such stories, often glamorised in modern Chinese dramas as drinking dens where coups were planned and plots imagined. Wooden screens create intimacy throughout the room, and fellow diners seemed to melt into the shadows; only a single low-lying lamp floats above each table, perhaps serving to highlight the most important aspect of the whole shebang – the food.

The menu is impressive, but for those expecting an exclusively Taiwanese menu, take heed: there are plenty of dishes drawn in from outside the island, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A dish in the style of wind shelter bay crab is a mighty delectable, spicy, garlic-heavy dish with its origins in the fishing boats moored in the typhoon shelters of Hong Kong, while pork slices with minced garlic and chilli (suan ni bai rou) is a cold appetiser from Sichuan province. A lot is also lost in translation. Fairly bog-standard 'stir-fried chicken with rice wine, soy sauce and sesame oil' is a famous Taiwanese dish esoterically called ‘three cups’ chicken (san bei ji), because the recipe calls for one cup of each condiment for its distinctive taste. A clay pot of tender chicken pieces came bathed in a rich dark caramel-coloured sauce, spiked with chillies and, surprisingly, a liquorice aroma from star anise.

However, fried oysters wrapped with egg, a staple street food famously found in the bustling night markets of Taipei but few places in London, is a moist omelette filled with succulent, briney baby oysters and pungent but tender stalks of garland chrysanthemum; here, the dish was competently cooked and true to the original. Likewise, a basket of steaming xiao long bao (soup-filled dumplings) were, flavour-wise, one of the best we’ve had in the capital. It was only let down by craftsmanship – instead of neat little pleats (and, if you believe the connoisseurs, a true dumpling master manages exactly 18 of them in each), the tops of the dumplings were stodgy and looked liked melted versions of a more perfect specimen, and the skins lacked the elasticity to prevent unfortunate splits. Still, the filling was perfectly seasoned, and the savoury, steaming-hot broth hit the palate with a flavour that the Chinese refer to simply and literally as ‘fresh, sweet’.

We found the service slow and dippy, the manager was brusque and the service charge was somewhat ambiguously described as ‘SC’ – and, to add insult to injury, on one visit our waitress asked if we’d ‘like to add a gratuity’ (on top of the ‘SC’, that is). But we found the food on our visits exciting – and, most importantly, different from anything else out there. It’s about time there was a rebellion.

Time Out Issue 1981: August 7 -13