Manchurian Legends

Chinatown is one of the few places I think looks better in the winter. I love summer nights and light evenings but there is a certain romance to wandering, coated, around the brightly lit streets of London’s Chinatown. The restaurant signs and peculiar window displays look so much better against the blackness of a winter night, and the kitchens breathe their steam into the cold and the smell of cooking oil impregnates the air with the flavours of China.

            When I walked into Manchurian Legends Matthew was already there, already sat at our table trying to take in as much of the surroundings as possible and note it down on the pieces of paper he had spread around him on the table. White tiles… old-fashioned clock on the wall… I resisted trying to read them across as I quickly tried to describe how I was getting along with life since we had last met.

            The menu was pretty comprehensive with every kind of meat appearing in every kind of form. We leaned in a conspiratorial way across the table to avoid being overheard; he told me to be prepared for some interesting food and not to be shocked by the Chinese compulsion to not waste any part of the animal and in return I muttered that I had heard the only way to judge if a restaurant in Chinatown was any good was to count how many Chinese people were in there. And by that measure we were doing well. When I looked down again at my menu I was rather caught by all the gruesome things I saw and we ordered a selection of starters that included pigs intestines and ‘thousand year egg’. Our waitress was young and so lovely and earnest, we had to quote the numbers of our orders because she couldn’t understand what we were asking for and when I asked what a thousand year egg was she had looked at its Chinese translation on the menu and replied that it was a really old egg and warned us against ordering it, saying that it was a very strong taste. This, of course, ensured it was one of our choices and I took another generous glug from my bottle of beer.

            Nearly all of our starters were heavily drizzled with lurid orange chilli oil. It has an almost fluorescent colour and although I really enjoy the spiciness of the experience, it made it hard for me to determine what a pig intestine actually tasted like. It was hard really to talk about the differences between each dish other than how they felt between my teeth: intestine is chewier than the chicken; both were less tough than the black fungus. Perhaps that is where the restaurant gets its name? Because you need to be a sort of legend to cope with the levels of spice?

The sweet and spicy soup was too gelatinous, but my thinner rib soup was more appetizing and the wholly lotus root that floated in it was similar in flavour to Jerusalem artichoke. I had to ask the waitress to come back and explain the thousand year egg to me again. The yoke was a very murky green, the white had turned into a dark coloured jelly, and I worried again over the logic of ordering something that looked (and sounded) so rotten. I cautiously squashed a piece of sinister looking yoke between my chopsticks and deposited it in my mouth. And I really enjoyed it; it was strong and smooth and made the tofu it was served with seem bland and spongy in comparison to the egg’s richness. I’m not so sure about the rubbery blackened-white; I found it unpleasant even if I tried to disguise it with a mouthful of shredded spring onion.

            We called the waitress back to choose a few dishes from some of the other sections of the menu and asked (with the numbers) for a few of the barbequed skewers. They were heavily seasoned with dry spices; cumin and chilli seeds and again, though the taste was enjoyable, it was hard to differentiate between the bovine, ovine and porcine sticks.

            We ordered our third round of dishes with a third round of beers and the waitress was starting to worry about the amount of food we were asking for. Is maybe enough now, she said as she cleared our plates. The beer had doused my blazing taste buds and the next dishes were much more mellow than fiery starters and I was sad to have reached this stage of our meal with such a full belly. The crispy deep-fried pork belly smelt strongly of vinegar and made me salivate as much as the spice had made me sweat. The slow-cooked green chilli’s were soft and full of flavour, the juicy duck perhaps not as juicy as it had claimed to be, and the soft shell crabs – eaten whole and coated in floury curried batter – were almost still crunchy, absolutely delicious, and the only thing we managed between us to finish.

We had missed out on the knuckles, pig’s ears and chicken hearts, but we were finally defeated. Saddened by the amount of food we still had on the table, the lovely waitress packed it up for me to take home, and said that next time we came she would tell us what her favourite things were and make sure we only ordered those. In the kitchen of my office the following day, though the decoration was strangely similar (white tiles, old fashioned clock on the wall), I can now confirm that Dongbei cuisine heated in a microwave isn’t the same as from a pot or a pan. Not all legends come back to life.