Hutong

Welcome to our collection of bespoke restaurants and bars in London, Beijing and our home Hong Kong.

Aqua Restaurant Group : Beijing / Hong Kong / London

http://www.hutong.co.uk

Hutong, The Shard - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

On the 33rd floor of the Shard, an ambitious Chinese restaurant that was still giving a slight impression of settling in on our visit; we had an enjoyable lunch, though, and prices are not unreasonable, considering.

Take the lift to the 33rd floor of the Shard, for example, and you find a complex comprising not one but two Aqua-group restaurants (Aqua Shard, British in style, as well as Hutong), and also a brasserie-style operation (Oblix) run by Rainer Becker of Zuma fame - the bars and dining rooms can accommodate hundreds of guests in total.

The landlords must have been cutting good deals, because space is used at these new establishments in a lavish way which those of us used to the West End's cosy ways can find it difficult to adjust to.

The dim sum menu - not especially helpfully divided up, in the way you'd find in Chinatown - seemed a good place to try a range of tastes, but the affable waiter steered us to the pre-chosen steamed selection from the main menu.

These came prettily colour coded, not something we can really recall before, but the differences of hue among the selection was more pronounced than the differences of taste - in every other way they hit the spot, though, and they certainly delivered quite a chilli kick.

Hutong Restaurant Review: Sky High Northern Chinese Cooking in ...

Chef Fei Wang is originally from Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province and so expect his mastery of all things hot and spicy to leave your palate tantalised.

Another absolutely fantastic dish was the scallop and prawn wontons with a hot and deliciously spicy sauce, as well as those rather addictive pan-fried wagyu beef buns which were most likely the best fluffy buns I’ve ever eaten.

Picking a favorite dish from our evening at Hutong was an impossible task as everything was so good, but a favourite of mine was these deep-fried morsels of juicy lobster meat, smothered in a richly flavoured mixture of Sichuan, red and green chillies, the most incredible salty black beans which were a highlight in themselves and a topping of fried garlic.

One of the most impressive dishes here at Hutong right now is the one everyone should be ordering when visiting – red star noodles.

I’m so glad I finally returned back to Hutong after all those years and chef Fei Wang has done an absolutely terrific job with this menu, turning Hutong into not just a destination restaurant for its views but also now its food.

Hutong - Northern Chinese Restaurant in The Shard, London

Grace Dent reviews Hutong at the Shard | London Evening Standard

ES Food Newsletter Despite the fact that I spent most of 2011 mumbling an ancient Carlisle curse at the cranes in London Bridge, the Shard has been completed.

Then Oblix opened — the restaurant that nobody is raving about — offering ‘jazz brunches’, to which I thought: ‘Would the Shard be any more palatable if I was inside it eating Wagyu beef while enduring a bunch of men in full funk-overbite mode clanking through a three-hour version of ‘Ol’ Man River’, playing some of the right notes in almost the right order?’

And then, last week, I was asked whether I wanted to go to Hutong on Level 33 of the Shard, to David Yeo’s new pocket-bruising, 130-cover restaurant serving contemporary northern Chinese cuisine, and sample his new signature dishes such as ‘Red Lantern’ (crispy soft-shell crab with Sichuan dried chilli, £28) or chilled spiced razor clams steeped in Chinese rose wine (£13), or crispy de-boned lamb ribs (£26).

Yes, I know), hand-prepared and roasted in the restaurant’s dedicated duck-roasting kitchen and then roll said duck in handmade pancakes while watching a London sunset from a table situated higher than the London Eye?

The soft-shell crab appears like a Game of Thrones prop, in a lantern full of bright red chillies.

Hutong, London, restaurant review - Telegraph

It must say something about your reviewer’s aesthetic sensibilities – and nothing flattering – that his favourite view from Hutong, perched above London on the 33rd floor of the European Union’s tallest building, came reflected in a mirror within the restaurant.

New York from the Empire State may be swankier and gleamier, Paris from the Eiffel Tower more beautiful (though the French didn’t have the Luftwaffe to contend with, of course); Rome from the Janiculum a more perfect palimpsest of Western civilisation.

Reflected in the glass, from the other side of the room, stood a row of golden, crispy-skinned ducks, and I cannot accept there is any more beauteous view than that.

We did not order the duck, sating ourselves instead with dim sum and larger dishes from a menu that mingles cuisines from various regions (most notably, the spicy, vinegary cooking of Szechuan).

The main courses mimicked the contrast between the glory of St Paul’s and the blandest tower block visible below.

Hutong: restaurant review | Life and style | The Guardian

The Shard, 31 St Thomas Street, London SE1 (020 7478 0540).

The restaurant occupies the 33rd floor of the Shard, by London Bridge, which I'm meant to hate but don't.

Ba Shan in Soho or Red Chilli in Manchester for the serious-chilli stuff from Hunan and Sichuan provinces; Four Seasons on Gerrard Street in Soho if you hanker after roast duck, yours for £20 in the kind of sweet-savoury sauce you would want to lick off a friend.

Even the dry-fried green beans/minced pork combo is now on the menu at the most banal Cantonese places.

There are thin slices of crisp cucumber interleaved with cold pork belly, to be dipped in a deep, toasty, fermented bean sauce with a hit of minced ginger and garlic; translucent discs of raw scallop with the invigorating bash of bitter citrus; de-boned marinated, braised and deep-fried lamb ribs, with fragile skin like baked nori seaweed; fat prawns with a seriously ill-mannered whack of chilli and peppercorns.