Restaurants

Keelung
Taiwanese seafood specialist
By Charmaine Mok
A trinity of Taiwanese restaurants, all engineered by the same restaurant group, have sprung up within Chinatown over the past year. Leong’s Legend was the pioneer, followed by the unoriginally named Leong’s Legend Continues, both serving nearly identical menus within minutes of each other. Keelung is but a mere polished-up version of the first two, but – given it shares its name with the major port city in northern Taiwan – with a bigger emphasis on seafood.

The Leong family (and their company, Restaurant Management UK Ltd) have done a remarkable job with the drab former site of Cantonese restaurant London Hong Kong. The whole ‘dark, dim and sexy’ approach is again applied to the interiors, with dark chocolate and caramel tones, chic wooden partitions and dark leather booths

Upon entering, you pass an impressive display of wines and fresh seafood. Clams, fat fish, prawns and mussels glistened on ice, though encased in a contraption perhaps more suited to the local supermarket’s seafood counter.

Still, thick fingers of sea-sweet razor clams (£3 each) served with a peppering of hot chillies, were steamed just enough to retain their juicy springiness. On the other hand, grey clams, stir-fried with ginger and spring onion, are equally fresh but overwhelmed by its starchy sauce.

A chef’s special of boneless pigs’ trotters in a claypot of soy sauce and rice wine was underwhelmingly bland, though the tenderness of the meat was commendable. On the other hand, assorted soy-braised meats, a classic Taiwanese assortment of titbits – in this case pigs’ ears, various offal and chicken feet – were overly salty and lacking the distinctive aromatic sweetness perfected by the Taiwanese. ‘Shilin market’ oyster omelette was nearly there, but lacked heat and vibrancy.

At the moment, it seems as though the Leongs are banking on the relative novelty of Taiwanese food to lure in the punters. But if they want Londoners to come back, they’ll have to work on making sure the food measures up.
Time Out London July 2009