Restaurants

I used to live right by the Compton Arms, but in 33 months I never once went there. And yet, in the three weeks since I moved flat, I’ve been there four times.

One reason is that the once-crusty regulars pub has been taken over by hipster millennials, and revamped. In: morello cherry goses, revolving IPAs on tap, and a fridge of Belgian sours. Out: your reassuring range of standard pub lagers.

Apparently, this caused a revolt among the pub’s oldest and most loyal supporters – and Fosters has returned to the tap lineup – except now the edited custom Fosters label reads ‘Compromise’.

Another reason is that I had been told by several people that Four Legs, now in residence Tuesdays to Sundays, does one of if not the best burger in London. This is the sort of recommendation that I cannot overlook.

Clearly unsatisfied with the plaudits they’ve earned for their burgers, Four Legs have branched out pretty widely. We couldn’t resist eating a full dinner, starting with the quail.

The quail was piled ridiculously high with truffle shavings, and to our surprise came bone in. I’m not certain that truffle added to this hugely, but then again I am almost always happy to eat truffle, especially at these prices, and the pieces of bird were battered and fried with a great deal of competence. A very pleasant dish.

Next came their take on a Thai green papaya salad. For me, this one didn’t really work: it somehow tasted a bit bland. I think it needed some more fish sauce and some more lime, and perhaps a little bit of sugar.

The leeks were essentially perfect. They came heavy and silky soft, and served on a solid lake of ‘curds’ – not the squeaky squares we were expecting, but a substance more like a mix of creamy burrata and tangy greek yoghurt. And the whole lot was drizzled with grassy olive oil, sprinkled with black pepper, and served with bread.

In a London where good sourdough bread comes by and large as standard this still stood out as particularly moist and dense, like they had implausibly managed to cook it themselves in the tiny pub kitchen alongside everything else.

Ultimately this is all preamble. This restaurant, at least in its current incarnation, is going to live and die on the strength of its burger. So I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the burger is very good, definitely in the top 10 for London and potentially in the top 5.

They get all the important things right. No fancy sauces, no fancy toppings. The onions are chopped so they don’t make it difficult to eat (like the insane practice of serving whole rings). There is no lettuce or tomatoes and the cheese is good honest American non-cheese.

The bun, despite being a brioche, is soft and lightly chewy, and does not have any trouble maintaining coherence in the face of the burger’s juice, grease, and liquid cheese onslaught. The patty itself was roughly average in heft, charred well on the outside, and moist, partly because it was so consistently cheesed and sauced.

Best of all, it comes with essentially an entire layer of finely sliced pickles, and the pickles are clearly homemade: very sharp and piquant, and much sweeter than the overly healthy ones you get in McDonalds.

Basically this is a good burger, from people who agree with me on all the essential points of what makes a burger good. The only issue I have with it is that it was served fully cooked through. However I know that many councils won’t let them serve their burgers pink, so it’s entirely possible that this is somebody else’s fault, not theirs.

Even hampered by the nanny state, Four Legs serve a rather pleasant meal for not much money at all (we spent about £40 on food and about £20 on two rounds of pints). And above all, they are the first restaurant I’ve ever been to that serves nice normal food and a genuinely good burger at the same time. If you’re nearby, go check it out.

Rating: One medal.

To get the first half of the review out of the way immediately: Beer + Burger Store is an excellent beer store. They serve a wide range of beers I’d like to drink, from milkshake IPAs to kettle sours, to spontaneous fermentations; and a wide range I’m less interested in but appreciate the existence of.

Many of the bottles and tins are expensive, but my willingness to pay for novel beer is almost unlimited and my depth of experiences buying online tell me that this isn’t driven by B+B’s mark-up.

But this is a restaurant review website, and while the quality of drinks will often tilt the scale in one direction or another, the strength of my recommendation will always depend mostly on the strength of the food offering. After all, there is a hipster bottle shop, beer bar, or taproom in almost every neighbourhood now, and while this is one of the better ones in Dalston/Haggerston, my absolute favourite nearby would be Seven Seasons on Hoxton Street. If we’re talking pure beer.

Weirdly enough, I ate B+B’s burgers twice last weekend. We were sitting in Highbury Fields on Saturday afternoon and it came up on Deliveroo. Their Deliveroo was pretty good, but it didn’t feel fair reviewing them on the basis of food that had by necessity rested at least half an hour when I ate it. It just so happened that I was in Haggerston that Sunday as well, and I thought why not go back and see what the real version is like.

The short answer is that their burgers are decent, but that decent burgers are par for the course in London now. Back in 2014 I could list every single good burger that London offered; London burgers were so scarce that we queued an hour for the opening of Shake Shack. Now people have learned how to make burgers good, and, presuming there is no Bleecker Burger nearby, there are at least ten places I’d be happy to walk into almost any day.

Beer + Burger Store make smashed burgers, like Shake Shack, but with far more commitment to the concept. Their bizarrely undersold ‘double cheeseburger’ is actually a triple: three smashed down, darkly caramelised, and crisped up patties, thicker than you’d expect, and slathered in American cheese, with a huge number of pickles.

The pickles are a highlight: clearly homemade, particularly excellent, and generously portioned – you get something like 20 little slices. The buns are also a highlight: incredibly soft, chewy, and yielding, and able to take any amount of grease and sauce thrown at them, unlike the fluffy brioche you are often given, which gives up without the slightest fight.

The patties should be another highlight: I love the way they are cooked on the outside, and the surprising heft means you occasionally see a tantalising glimpse of pink or purple. But the beef ends up tasting bland and grey – I think this is due both to significant underseasoning and excessively lean meat going into the mince.

The best burgers require nothing but cheese, onions, and maybe pickles, and all of these merely highlight the beefiness that should be the focus of the dish. Here I found myself adding ketchup to get myself through.

Some of the other options were stronger. The chicken burger was one of the best I’ve had: clearly brined to the proper juicy texture, with soft chewy bun perfectly complimenting the bone dry crunchy batter. I have the greatest admiration for how they offer dipping gravy – how much better it is than ketchup or mayo for chips, or even for your burger itself.

In some ways this is an unfairly negative review. In 2013 Beer + Burger Store would probably have ranked among my favourite burger joints in London. I probably would have featured it on lists of London’s best burgers, and regularly sent my friends there to sample its wares. But it’s the current year, and in the current year the quality of burgers in London is so high as to make B+B just another decent burger joint.

(No medals.)

I’ve been back to Chik’n since the review below and tried out their chicken tenders (both spicy and regular style), chips, dips and a burger. The tenders were a lot better – extremely crispy but also juicy and flavoursome. The dips were served in very generous pots. Overall it is now probably a two medal spot, and I’ll be back.

This is a one medal review, which means if you like the sound of it, you should check it out, but don’t go out of your way for it. That sounds like faint praise, but there are so many restaurants out there, ones that charge fifty pounds a head plus wine, that can’t even manage that. It’s why fast food is such a wonderful thing: you know what you’ll get, more or less, and it’s cheap. I am a fast food fan – I understand that and why others don’t think much of it, but to me it’s often difficult to beat the simple deliciousness of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, or a KFC Hot Wing.

Of course, a lot of fast food sucks. Chik’n is an attempt by Chick ‘n’ Sours to get into that scene and do fast food that has the quality of its food at its ‘parent’ branches. (Annoyingly, Chik’n and Chick ‘n’ Sours have inconsistent spellings of the word “chicken”.) I adored Chick ‘n’ Sours’s original Haggerston restaurant, but always felt that the Covent Garden branch wasn’t quite as good. Chik’n is, I presume (and hope), the prototype for more stores.

The menu is basically a stripped-down version of the Chick ‘n’ Sours menu. No sichuan aubergine or chicken nacho chips, and crucially no whole pieces of chicken thigh or breast. But there are chicken sandwiches, tenders and wings, and all at pretty reasonable prices.

Here’s what I had, and what I thought of each:

• Straight Up Chik’n sandwich: Tasted good, but let down by texture. Not enough mayo, chicken was too dry, and too much bun. Just too dry overall. I’d have preferred if it was buttered like a Chick Fil A bun, or maybe even steamed like a Filet-O-Fish at McDonald’s.
• Tenders: Good. Not as juicy as a KFC chicken tender, but far crispier, and well-seasoned. Carried the dip well. Maybe for the price they should be bigger, or you should get one more.
• Wings: Excellently cooked for breaded wings, which are often soft or soggy. They were enormous as well – bigger than the McDonald’s Mighty Wings that were famously huge in the US. But the seasoning could have been better (KFC Hot Wings are the ones to beat here) and, annoyingly, they were so big that I couldn’t fit them in to the dip tub.
• Blue cheese dip: Delicious and brilliantly cheap at 20p for a tub. It is so blue cheesy, it’s really a pleasure to eat at a place like this. But the tub was small, and I wanted more. They should just double the size and price.
• Fries: Fine. Maybe good if there’d been more dip, or if you don’t like chicken. Don’t bother otherwise.

The restaurant is similar in feel to a burrito place like a Chilango – it’s not quite as low-rent as a McDonald’s or KFC, but it looks easy to wipe down with a cloth all the same. There’s a sink, so you can wash your hands when you’re done (nice touch), and there was plenty of space to sit when I went on a weekday lunchtime.

Most importantly, they have managed to recreate the ungreasy crispiness that makes their chicken special, and if they can do it at scale and in many different places and sort out my minor complaints this will be clearly superior to KFC. I’ll go again and try a different sandwich. At worst, I’ll order an extra tub of blue cheese dip and pour it on one myself.

Rating: One medal.

There are endless “best restaurant in London” lists, but in our (Sam Bowman’s & Ben Southwood’s) view nearly all of them are rubbish. They’re too expensive and tend to focus on things other than food like service, ambience and image. These things are all important, but with Straight Up London, we have tried to create a guide to where a normal person should eat because the food tastes good for the price you pay. That doesn’t mean they’re all cheap, but the ones that aren’t are really, truly worth it. There are lots of places we recommend, and far more that we don’t recommend, but here are the places we adore and return to time after time. This, in no particular order, is our list of the absolute creme de la creme, the must-visit places London has to offer, and why we keep going back to them.

1. Som Saa, Spitalfields

Som Saa’s Thai food is outstanding, as good or better than most of the best food in Thailand with the punchy flavours that make Thai food so good. The deep fried whole sea bass, piled high with herbs and toasted rice, is a joy to pick apart with your hands, and the rest of the menu is updated frequently. Not every dish works, but that’s a testament to the constant experimentation and innovation that goes on in the kitchen, which explains why Som Saa is still at the top of its game. Even the cocktails are good – the Dragon’s Milk, made with sticky rice rum and coconut cream, is one of the best I’ve had anywhere.—SB

2. Bleecker Street, Victoria

Everybody likes hamburgers. Bleecker make easily the best burgers in town, even when ridiculous council restrictions stop them offering their signature Bleecker black, where the two unbelievably juicy patties sandwich a slab of soft Clonakilty black pudding. There may well be some burger, somewhere, that is even better, but I find it hard to believe. I have eaten dozens and yet I am still thinking, writing this, of how I can somehow engineer getting one at some point today. They’re that good.—BS

3. Silk Road, Camberwell

Nowhere else in London is like Silk Road – an unassuming, dingy-looking place from the outside, Silk Road is a family-run restaurant specialising in food from the Xinjiang province of China, where central Asian and Muslim influences make the food totally unlike the Cantonese that most of us are used to. Chili, cumin and salt are the key flavours here, best shown off in the lamb skewers with molten cubes of fat and meat cooked over hot coals. The hand-pulled noodles are excellent, as are the ‘home style’ cabbage and aubergine dishes that bring rich meatiness to otherwise-boring vegetables. Best of all are the prices, which are low enough to let you experiment without too much danger, and especially the £2.60 Tsingtao beers – an offer I just can’t refuse.—SB

4. Smokestak, Shoreditch

Barbecue in London has never really taken off. Yes, you can eat solid, decent smoked meat from one of Bodeans’s efficiently-distributed outlets. But the upper end of the market has struggled: Shotgun closed down and Pitt Cue decided to stop offering the low and slow experiments that made them such a success initially. So Smokestak is one of a kind, offering both glorious staples like slices of juicy brisket and genius innovations like smoked girolles on dripping-drenched toast. The sheer depth of their cooking talent means they even do well when they try their hand at zingy, fresh raw fish dishes and baked potatoes slathered in rarebit.—BS

5. Blacklock, Soho

The number one request we get is to recommend a meat place that isn’t insanely expensive. I always say Blacklock and every single time I get a text afterwards saying it was amazing. Not only is it the best place in London to get a steak, it is also the best place to get a pork or lamb chop. What’s more, you can get all of these things at the same time for £20, which is before you even consider the dripping trencher—a slab of focaccia-esque bread on which they pile all of the chops. There is almost literally nothing better than bread heavy with the juices of wood-grilled meat. I won’t be satisfied until there is a Blacklock in every neighbourhood of the UK.—BS

6. Good Friend Chicken, Soho

There’s not much more to say than this: Good Friend chicken, located just beside Leicester Square, will sell you a frisbee-sized piece of chicken breast, hammered flat, breaded and deep fried, for £6. The popcorn chicken – which really just increases the surface area at the expense of less moist, juicy chicken – is good too, and a steal at £3 a bag. They’ll also shake your choice of flavour powders on top to give an extra little kick – I have been at least a dozen times and still haven’t tried all the different combinations, but right now Thai flavouring plus salt and pepper is my combo of choice. The chili plus numbing sichuan pepper is a favourite, too.—SB

7. Santana Grill, Victoria

Mexican food still isn’t really a Thing in London, as indicated by the fact that clearly the best place around is a street food stall in Westminster, of all places, that is only open on weekday lunchtimes. Yes, you can get a peerless burrito with familiar stuff like cochinita pibil. But it is in the rare or off-menu offerings that Santana really excels: chilorio—pork confited in chile and lard served with pickled onions, smoked chicken tacos, or, best of all, the “bronut”. The bronut is a genius innovation where a regular jam doughnut is sliced open and filled with pulled brisket. It sounded like a bad idea to me at first, but that was until I tasted it.—BS

8. Kanada-Ya, Soho

Until I went to Kanada-Ya, I didn’t really understand why everyone was so het up about ramen. It’s just noodle soup, I thought. Now I understand what the fuss is all about: unbelievably creamy and strongly-flavoured pork broth, alkaline noodles with some bouncy al dente bite, slices of tender and meaty pork, and all the other accoutrements that balance each other perfectly. What’s more, ramen is a paradigmatic example, like pizza, of a food it just doesn’t make sense to ever make at home—it only makes sense at scale. It’s literally impossible to make a bowl of ramen nearly as good as Kanada-Ya offer for a price even approaching the generous £10.50 they’ll give you one for.—BS

9. A Wong, Victoria

Where Silk Road is a homely soul food restaurant offering big bold flavours and generous portions for a pittance, A Wong is a delicate high end specialist trying to push the boundaries and hone down classics into works of art. At lunch they offer only dim sum with whimsical designs—the fried rabbit dumpling is an orange and green carrot, and the sweet duck yolk dessert could be mistaken for a satsuma. At dinner, they have dishes from across China: crispy chilli beef, sweet and sour chicken, fish fragrant aubergine, and tea eggs whose yolk you will cut up and burst into a waiting nest of filo. In every case gloop is refined to cutting sweetness, grease to soothing fat and stodge to firm savoury satisfyingness. It shows you why these dishes spread so much in the first place.—BS

10. Kricket, Soho

The words “small plates” usually make my heart sink. Too little food shared between too many people, like butter spread over too much bread. But Kricket makes it work, using the opportunity to innovate with wonderful Indian dishes that, if you could only try one, would make you and your friends all jealous of each other’s dishes all night. I regularly find myself craving the bhel puri – a street snack of puffed rice and vegetables mixed with chutney and yoghurt – and the tandoori monkfish was one of the best pieces of fish I’ve ever had.—SB

11. The Dairy, Clapham

Modern European tasting menus can be great, but they can also be prissy, pretentious and a bit staid. Plus, they are always incredibly expensive. I would recommend The Dairy over any of the pricier higher-end tablecloth meals I have been to, as good as they were—it exemplifies what this sort of cuisine can be. Every dish is a surprising and exciting delight, and you hope again and again that you’ve miscounted and they’re going to bring you an extra course you forgot about. The best dish I had here was a truffled brie on toast with honey, but nearly everything manages to combine a new experience with easy deliciousness. What’s more, the seven course tasting menu is still only £48.—BS

12. Coal Rooms, Peckham

One of the newest restaurants on this list, the Coal Rooms occupies the old ticket office at Peckham Rye train station, with one of the rooms turned into a giant charcoal fire pit for roasting meat that, if you’re lucky, you can be seated around. The menu changes frequently and usually features ingredients and combinations I’ve never seen anywhere else – goat belly char siu, beef brisket Russian salad (has to be tried – so much better than it sounds), and the “Peckham Fatboy”, a giant potato croquette covered with melted raclette cheese and mayonnaise. Don’t be too distracted by the wackier-sounding dishes on offer – the grilled meat is superb too, and usually comes in the form of one enormous chop to share. It sounds strange, but make sure you check out the bathrooms – they’ve turned the old station bathrooms into a glorious palace, unlike any I’ve ever seen.—SB

13. Knife, Clapham

Perhaps we shouldn’t, when reviewing a steak restaurant with access to the most sought-after beef in the country, home in on Yorkshire puddings. But the fact that Knife gift you a large and entirely unheralded plate of Yorkshires inbetween your starters and main course highlights exactly why it’s such a nice place to eat. Yes, the beef is fantastic, yes the bread is hot from the oven and fancy little rolls rather than the omnipresent sourdough slices, yes there is wonderful gravy, and yes their sides are almost universally great. But it’s the little things like the unprompted doggy swan made out of aluminium foil for my precious leftover food that make me want to go back all the time, even just to hang out there.—BS

14. KOI Ramen, Brixton

If Kanada-ya is my head’s favourite ramen, KOI is my heart’s. I couldn’t believe that this tiny stall in Pop Brixton could make such a rich tonkotsu broth when I first tried it (and loved it so much that I ordered an entire bowl, straight after the pizza that was supposed to be my dinner). And I still can’t believe it now that it’s expanded to Tooting and Brick Lane and kept that high standard up. It’s a near-perfect bowl of fatty meaty goodness, and for only £6.50 it feels like I’m getting away with daylight robbery every time.—SB

15. Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting

What makes Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting’s best Sri Lankan restaurant, so good? It’s not the dry fried spicy mutton or the creamy, spicy aubergine curry, or even the chunky £1 mutton rolls. It’s not even the Paneer or Chicken “65”, flourescent pink nuggets of crispy fried protein that I can’t help but wolf down as soon as they arrive at the table. It’s because I know I can rely on it when I want to show off to my friends what really makes me tick, food-wise – affordable, interesting, fun and above all delicious food that you just can’t get anywhere else.—SB

16. Hélène Darroze at the Connaught

Of all the restaurants on the list, this is the fanciest and the priciest. If you go for dinner, it’s going to be at least £100 for food, and the cheapest wine on the menu is around £50 a bottle—it goes far, far higher. But sometimes you get what you pay for, not just in exquisite service and an incredibly beautiful old world dining room. Their chicken consomme tasted like an entire chicken compressed into a tiny, amazingly clear little dose of broth. Of course, nothing I had there will still be on the menu, but their range of skill—from confit chicken leg “tacos” to palate-cleansing apple soups means that I trust them to do anything well.—BS

17. Umut 2000, Dalston

There are hundreds of shiny metal charcoal grills in London, all offering an ostensibly similar menu of meat skewers with meze and flatbreads. Very few of them are places where you can’t get a decent meal for a decent price. But Umut 2000 (apparently Umut is a Turkish first name meaning hope) is the decentest of the lot. For £30 you can get a truly ginormous plate of chicken and lamb of various types, with unlimited warm tangy bread, and a huge plate of meze. Despite some very credible attempts, I have never managed to finish this between two, or even three, and despite the sheer quantity I have never encountered a single dry, tough, or bland piece of meat.—BS

18. Chick ‘n’ Sours, Haggerston

For something as simple as fried chicken it’s amazingly difficult to get right. Everywhere either overcooks it to a dry husk, tries to dress it up some flavourless meat with “fancy” flavourings and sides, or, worst and most common of all, gives you something swimming in grease that resembles something like what you’d get at a Morley’s at 2 o’clock in the morning. Not Chick ‘n’ Sours, though. I don’t know how they do it, but their chicken is not greasy at all, it’s just succulent and moist and actually tastes of something by itself. The dips are unintrusive – though I maintain that their St Agur blue cheese and buttermilk dip is one of the best things to have with chicken and chips, anywhere – and unusual sides like fish fragrant aubergine, pickled watermelon and kimchi nachos make every part of the meal a pleasure. In my experience the Haggerston branch is considerably better than the Covent Garden one, though, including when the Haggerston people did a residency in Brixton, so consider this an endorsement of that one only.—SB

19. Smoke & Salt, Brixton

Smoke and Salt’s “concept” – emphasising traditional techniques in things like curing and pickling – might sound faddish, but don’t let that put you off. This little place, occupying a little shipping container in Pop Brixton, is a testament to what a few talented chefs can do with discipline and a willingness to take risks with classic ingredients. Most dishes are far more than the sum of their parts – crispy new potatoes with gorgonzola, chimichurri and beef could hardly be bad, but somehow they make it shine, and make you wish that every other fried potato dish was just like it. Charred coley was cooked to perfection, a perfect example of how to cook fish without letting it become dry or textureless. The food is inexpensive and the menu changes seasonally, and while not every dish works, you’ll prefer Smoke and Salt’s noble failures to most restaurants’ successes.—SB

20. Lahore Karahi, Tooting

Two Indian-subcontinent restaurants within five minutes of each other on Tooting High Street might seem like overkill. But Lahore Karahi’s curries are the perfect compliment to Apollo Banana Leaf’s more unconventional dishes, and my favourite place for “traditional” Indo-Pakistani food in London. Grilled meats, like the fenugreek and chicken seekh kebab or the lamb chops, explode with flavour, and the house curries are simply far, far better than their equivalents at other curry houses. It’s cheap, it’s cheerful, and to dine in it’s most definitely unglamorous – but it’s also the best curry in London I’ve had.—SB

21. Peckham Bazaar, Peckham

Think of “balkan” food and you’ll probably either think of stodgy Greek stuff like moussaka or, worse, huge slabs of overcooked meat and boiled vegetables, Serbian-style. That’s unfair, and nothing will shatter that prejudice like a trip to Peckham Bazaar. If you go in the spring or summer, you’ll likely get something like grilled marinated octopus (non-rubbery, naturally) and prawns, or halibut kebabs, alongside courgette fritters. Go in the autumn or winter and slow-roasted meats will be on offer. The team here are true masters of their craft, creating new dishes daily according to what’s fresh and delicious, showing off obscure spices and vegetables from the Eastern Mediterranean and cooking their ingredients to perfection. Not only have I never had a bad meal here, I’ve never had a bad dish here.—SB

If you’ve enjoyed this, please consider sharing it on Twitter or Facebook! 

What’s worse than a place with no redeeming qualities? A place with plenty of redeeming qualities that still doesn’t hit the mark. Tea Room, the cocktail bar below Bun House at the corner of Greek Street in Soho, ticks some of the right boxes – it’s difficult to beat the aesthetic of mid-century China, a cross between 1960s Hong Kong and 1930s Shanghai, and a few of the dishes are good enough to justify their hefty price tags. But overall, Tea Room just doesn’t do what it needs to do to work.

The drinks menu really is gorgeous, a pastiche of an old Chinese newspaper with false adverts for airlines advertising baijiu, the Chinese national spirit, and an impressive list of rice wines. At six pounds a bottle, beers were only really worthwhile because they’re all obscure (to me, at least) Chinese brands. But the ambiance isn’t good enough to justify paying £12 a cocktail – the decor is mostly right, but it’s too bright, too cramped and too uncomfortable to spend a night drinking cocktails there. The tables and chairs were about as cosy as a plush McDonalds’s, which is tolerable for food but not exactly where you’d want to spend a whole evening over drinks. It’s just not intimate the way a good cocktail bar needs to be.

On to the food, then – Tea Room sits beneath the casual steamed bun place Bun House, with a full menu of its own. Our house pickles (£4) were well-made and generously portioned, compared to some cheeky places that seem to think they can make up their margins by saving on daikon radish.

The dry fried asparagus with cloud ear mushroom was just pointless – it was exactly what it sounds like, with no more than a bit of celery to give it flavour. My companion charitably suggested that it needed salt, but the truth was that it was a stir fry of three not very interesting vegetables and nothing else. For four pounds, I would be a bit disappointed; for the £8 that it was, I felt positively ripped off. Eventually we poured some of the soy sauce from another dish into it to give it at least some flavour.

Lacey dumplings (£9) were far better – five soft pork and prawn dumplings hanging off the underside of a a crispy fried pancake, which added a crunchy texture to the dumplings that came with it. The dumplings themselves were not outstanding, but they were well-filled and seasoned, and the combination of textures was enjoyable and new to me.

Paying £14 for what was, essentially, a bowl of rice, aubergine and minced pork was not fun. Fish fragrant aubergine is a marvellous dish that takes one of the worst vegetables and, through the magic of chinese vinegars and spices, turns it into something rich and savoury that is unlike any other meal. This was like that, but if an accountant had made it. What am I paying for in a dish that is 80% rice, 15% aubergine and 5% pork mince? How does someone justify charging £14 for that? I can only assume that, like the similar nearby restaurant Xu, these rice dishes are how the money is made. No thanks.

Our plate of barbecued meat skewers (£3 each), cooked with chili, cumin, and salt, was far better. My favourite was the chicken gizzards, but the lamb shoulder and chicken thighs also worked well. The pork belly was forgettable – cumin and chili, which gave the other meats their flavour, may not work so well with pork, and this tasted sweeter like it was cooked with sugar too. But Kiln’s skewers are cheaper and Silk Road’s are better seasoned, and both taste like they’re actually sizzling from the coals and not like they’ve been kept under a heat lamp for ten minutes. Barbecued skewered meat should be threaded with crispy, molten fat, and these weren’t.

Only one dish really stood out as being truly excellent and, amazingly, somewhat good value for the price (£15). The sugar skin iberico pork char siu had stunningly crispy, sweet roasted skin, and the thick veins of fat inside were as delicious as good pork should always be. Every bite was a little explosion of crunchy sweetness that gave way to rich, porky fatty flavour. It was even quite a generous portion that left two hungry people satisfied.

Overall, though, I cannot recommend Tea Room. Unless you are a die-hard fan of 1960s East Asian pop music (and who isn’t, to some extent?), or you are seriously stuck for dinner in central Soho with someone you want to impress, there is better food like this around and for a better price. Everything seemed to be about 25-30% more expensive than it should be – if that bill had been £30/head instead of £40/head, the whole experience might have been much more satisfying.

I appreciate that a location like this – maybe the most central location in Soho – isn’t cheap, but that’s no reason for me to go there. The style is beautiful, but let down by the atmosphere. And the food is uneven at best, made worse by the price.

Rating: No medals.

Sorry the photos are all a bit discoloured. I sat below some green neon lights.