Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Dongbei – literally, ‘East-North’, in Chinese – is what we used to call Manchuria. This cold region, between Russia and North Korea and comprising several provinces, isn’t a renowned culinary area in the way that, say, Sichuan, Guangdong (Canton), or even Hangzhou, Fujian, or Chiuchow are. Dongbei food’s filling and hearty, with generous portions of potatoes, stewed noodles, dumplings and salty sauces commonplace. In Beijing, Dongbei places are popular theme restaurants; the waitresses wear brightly coloured Manchurian peasant costumes, the furniture’s rustic, and the dining rooms reek of cigarette smoke and cheap booze.

Royal Wok’s not a theme restaurant, but it is one of a small number of eateries serving Dongbei dishes outside China. It even has a proper Dongbei chef, from Shenyang in Liaoning province. (Another Dongbei chef works at Gourmet San – also on Bethnal Green Road). But it doesn't just serve a few Dongbei dishes – it serves lots of seldom-seen mainland Chinese dishes, Dongbei and otherwise. The dishes we ordered represent the kind of cooking which is trendy in mainland China right now, and are all very different from the Cantonese dishes that dominate the UK.

Mixed vegetable in garlic sauce, might sound simple by name but it is a popular northern-style starter. A cold plate of celery sticks, wood ear mushroom, ‘tofu skin’, raw carrot and peanut. A dish that’s colourful and crunchy, though it tasted as if it had a shade too much MSG for some tastes. (If you don’t like MSG, tell the waitress and the chef will omit it from the dish.) It was my personal favourite of the many dishes we tried.
Five-spice beef was a simple cold platter of thinly sliced, chewy beef in chilli oil with sesame seeds, inspired by Sichuan food. Just don’t eat the chillies.

With the chilli crab, the Chinese characters used to describe this dish are intriguing – ‘The East is Red; Fragant and Hot’, reads the Pinyin. But what you get is a huge bowl of dismembered crab, which has a high grapple factor but not a lot of crab meat in it. Chilli-garnished dishes like this mimic Sichuan-style presentation, though in this case using seafood – Sichuan is landlocked. But this wasn’t a good version; the peanuts should be crisp but weren’t, the oil wasn’t as good as it should be. Again, don’t eat the chillies.

Sandy pork, from the ‘Sandy Dishes’ section of the menu, makes no more sense in Chinese; the Pinyin reads ‘wind sand tenderloin’ (which doesn’t help much). What you get is a bowl resembling fried breadcrumbs with salt, sugar, garlic, crushed peanuts and MSG smothering some strips of pork. It’s not bad, even in there’s something a bit KFC about it.

Steamed tofu, Hakkan village-style, is presented like a big steaming pile of scrambled egg. You scoop the bean curd in your spoon, then dip it into the glutinous sauce containing minced pork, peas and soy sauce. Much better than than the crab claws.

Cucumber pancake features cucumber matchsticks coated then fried, with a result like tempura. A good dish, reminiscent of the Korean p’ajeon; an enjoyable and unusual dish. No dipping sauce though, just some sugar as seasoning.

There are plenty of other unusual dishes on the menu – hundreds in fact, covering regions from Sichuan to Shanghai. Royal Wok’s other chef is from Xinjiang (‘New Territory’) in the very far west of the modern state of China, and so the region’s Turkic-style Uyghur dishes are also represented, exemplified by the curious sight of pitta bread with some dishes. At the table next to us, a Chinese family were tucking into lamb kebabs (yang rou chuan), and da pan ji, ‘big plate chicken’, which are also probably worth a try.

Royal Wok isn’t the best Chinese cooking you can find; by trying to represent nearly every cuisine type in China, it succeeds in mastering none. It’s a very modest place, has no alcohol licence (it’s currently BYO) and boasts a long menu which is impenetrable if you don’t read Mandarin. But it has many unusual and interesting mainland Chinese dishes, and makes a refreshing change from Canto-chow.

Time Out London Issue 2013: March 19-25 2009