Eat Out London!Reviews and related sites
Fay Maschler Begins a 'Glorious Wind-Up to the Year' With Dim Sum ...
food drinks staff
So this may well be the time to put things on ice for a couple of weeks, as the papers’ halls are decked with Christmas content and the critics return to happier climes away from London.
Otto’s For many in the foodie media set, a “glorious wind-up to the year” involves getting steadily, but comprehensively pickled over a multi-hour lunch at Otto’s.
Of course, restaurants are never just about the food: here, “conviviality” is taken to “semi-hysterical,” “full high dramatis” extremes: owner Otto Tepasse comes from the old school, and offers a “very old-school manner of hospitality” to match.
Simpson’s in the Strand The final review this week is from Jay Rayner, who finds himself deeply disappointed by the renovated, relaunched Simpson’s in the Strand.
The food here always used to be exemplary, if of a certain style: a kitchen that “laughed in the face of modernity,” knocking out a combination of “the best kind of leftovers” (ham hock fritter with fried duck egg, yes please) or “what school dinners hope to be when they grow up.”
Restaurant review: Duddell's - Business Traveller – The leading ...
food location
Dim sum – the culinary treats that have become the signature meal of Chinatown restaurants around the world – is a recent innovation, less than a century old.
Hong Kong restaurants started to showcase their chefs’ talents at lunchtimes, in the hope that office workers who dropped in for lunch might return for dinner to spend the big bucks on corporate or family entertainment.
Dim sum continues to evolve in Hong Kong; the competition between restaurants can be intense.
Big chains such as Super Star used to pack in the crowds in Central, while smaller outposts catered to outlying districts; Tim Ho Wan in Kowloon has the distinction of being the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant.
Dim sum spread to other Chinese cities and countries before being reimported; the Din Tai Fung chain is originally Taiwanese, but now has branches in Hong Kong.
Duddell's London Restaurant Review - olive magazine
food staff menu desserts
Michelin-starred Duddell’s has been a port of call for aficionados of high-end Cantonese cooking in Hong Kong since 2013, and now this uber-luxe outfit has opened a second outpost in London Bridge.
Ex-Hakkasan chef Daren Liew heads the kitchen, delivering a lengthy menu packed with classically inflected Cantonese dishes, from dim sum and double-boiled soups to sweet and sour pork and XO beef shin.
The second stand-out plate was the supreme lobster noodle – a classic celebratory dish in Cantonese cooking.
This came as a big platter of noodles and large chunks of shell-on lobster that had been braised in a rich stock and then stir-fried with seaweed, lily bulb, ginger and spring onion.
Fat, deep-fried prawns with a yuzu-lime leaf sauce were ultra juicy, while a dish of abalone – a large mollusc prized as a delicacy in Chinese cuisine – was too chewy for our tastes.
Duddell's: A glorious Cantonese symphony | London Evening ...
staff menu food
I am studying the Cantonese menu, the creation of head chef Daren Liew who has long experience at the high end of Chinese cooking and spent time in the kitchens at Duddell’s in Hong Kong, a fusion of food and art that for a while held two Michelin stars (back to one now, due perhaps to the departure of founding chef Siu Hin-Chee).
Dishes such as crispy salted chicken, supreme lobster noodle and honey-glazed char siu with soybeans sing out to be chosen, the more so since they are based on Bresse chicken, prime Berkshire pork and, in the lobster assembly, supreme stock.
Steeped in hot broth with Parma ham, Japanese dried scallop and dried shrimp before being air-dried and crisped in hot oil, the chicken has layers of flavour that they don’t even chirp about in Bresse.
Supreme lobster noodle is lauded on the menu as being the pinnacle of Chinese fine dining so we figure it must be ordered, as this is unequivocally Chinese fine dining.
Cantonese Dim Sum Symphony from the à la carte — and thus available on evenings — features all shellfish fillings: in the case of the one fashioned as a goldfish compete with beady eyes, it is prawn.
Restaurant Review: Duddell's
menu food staff desserts
As is the case at the Hong Kong original, the Cantonese food served at Duddell’s London has an unequivocal fine dining slant.
Of the skin and fat-coated meat’s large (somewhat unnecessary) selection of accompaniments – such as hoi sin sauce, peanut and sesame sauce, pineapple, cucumber and spring onion – fennel-spiked sugar has a transcendent quality that elevates the already sweet, rich, delightful flavour.
The second course is available stir-fried in one of three sauces: Martell black pepper, truffle, or spring onion and ginger.
Favouring famed Poulet de Bresse chicken from France, Cantonese soya chicken (£26) is poached in a stock of soya sauce and spice then smoked with jasmine tea leaf, the skin lashed with hot oil in order for it to crisp, not unlike the duck.
Served in a paper bag, the cooking of the chicken is technically brilliant, but the dish lacks outstanding depth – failing to set the world on fire in the same manner as the superlative Peking duck.
Duddell's restaurant review - London, UK | Wallpaper*
A firm favourite among Hong Kong’s art world elite, Duddell’s has finally landed in London.
In the Grade II-listed St Thomas Church, a few steps from the looming Shard, the restaurant’s Queen Anne exterior, high stained-glass windows, original dark timber wall panelling and ecclesiastical altar sets the tone for local firm Michaelis Boyd’s modern aesthetic inspired by traditional 1960s Hong Kong tea houses; set over two levels, bold green and blue-grey hues are revealed through leather banquettes, geometric rubber flooring and a tiled central bar.
Here, chef Daren Liew churns out the same elevated Cantonese fare that won the restaurant its legion of Hong Kong fans and its two Michelin stars.