[title]
Specialising in cuisine from the north-central Chinese city of Xi’an, this upmarket restaurant is named after a hot meat sandwich, or ‘murger’, whose clay-oven-baked bread’s recipe is believed to pre-date Christ.
My advice, though, is to skip past it, to the dish where that same meat patty gets mangled into tiny pieces and put into soup.
The lamb murger soup was a revelation: claret-hued lamb slices bobbed in an intense, rich broth, whose silken belts of hand-pulled noodles were topped with murger bread morsels that had taken on the texture of al dente pasta.
On my mid-week visit, the largely Asian crowd that filled this contemporary, chic take on the original Euston branch had also shunned the murger for big, steaming bowls of mega-fresh hand-pulled noodles – particularly the lip-numbingly spicy biang biang version. It’s not unusual to hear these kind of wide, flat noodles referred to as ‘belt noodles’. But given the insane proportions of these ones, the description feels particularly apt – they’re so oversized, you could genuinely use one to keep your trousers up.
As for the murgers, they weren’t great. A pork version was dryer than one of Theresa May’s speeches, the spicy beef murger dripped with oil and the bread in both was disappointingly claggy. So do go. Just go for everything but the murger.