XU Teahouse & Restaurant

XU Teahouse & Restaurant. A Taiwanese restaurant by BAO London

XU · 許儒華苑

Please use the form below for reservations or contact us on 020 3319 8147 or [email protected].

For groups of five or more please contact reservations

http://xulondon.com

XU - Restaurant Review - Adelie Foods

Head of Innovation, Jonny Hehir, reviews XU, a new Taiwanese restaurant in Rupert Street, Soho.

(Of the culinary order) From Mr Lasagne (the lasagna restaurant) New York speakeasy (Spuntino) through to the very high quality street food stalls down the main street.

We were headed to “Xu”, the new Taiwanese restaurant with its own unique street food options as well as more refined dishes.

Taiwanese, like regional Chinese is something relatively new to the UK and knowing that the team behind Xu were the proponents of the Bao chain significantly raised our expectations.

(if there’s one dish you should try here it’s this) Bak Kwa is Taiwanese jerky and includes little slices of warm pork, lamb and beef served like slices of toast in a mini Dualit.

Xu: A new Soho star waiting to shine | London Evening Standard

Heading for the second Bao restaurant in Windmill Street Fitzrovia — after the original Saturday takeaway in Netil Market and then Bao in Lexington Street, Soho, which had to install a sort of bus stop opposite for the queues — I was given a hint by someone in the know that for help getting a seat I should ask for a person called Wai Ting.

Xu is the restaurant keenly anticipated from this industrious, serious, quietly charming extended family, where Taiwanese food in London is explored in greater depths and taken to higher heights and — glory be!

The new restaurant is named after Erchen’s late grandfather, described on the menu as “a free-spirited charismatic gentlemen, a journalist and a lover of tea and poetry”.

Among xiao tsai (their spelling), the snacks that serve as bar food or starters, chicken extremities come as feet braised in soy but not for long enough — the skin clings like tight gloves on a dowager’s bony hands — or a lollipopped wing sanbei (a glaze of sesame oil, soy sauce and cooking wine) topped cheekily with a tiny mound of caviar.

For those of us willing to dance with the devil, Gold Coin, a tiny spring- onion pancake topped with foie gras terrine and a shiny bonnet of goji berry and Shaoxing wine jelly is rewarding, but beef pancake, where short rib and bone marrow topped with crunchy potato crumbs are offered with cunningly cut cucumber and spring onions and also a tangle of chilli-spiked root vegetable pickle, is something else — although the pancakes would have been livelier cooked or heated to order.

Matthew Bayley reviews Xu, London: 'A couple of tweaks away from ...

Modern life is not quite rubbish.

A few weeks ago, I bad-temperedly declared that the internet – with all of its miracles – has done absolutely nothing to improve my life: it’s just made me volcanically impatient.

Xu, London W1: 'Honestly: swoon' | Marina O'Loughlin | Life and ...

Early controversial dishes (the much-maligned chickens’ feet) have been ditched, and now even seemingly throwaway elements thrill: jerkies (bak kwa) of pork, beef and lamb come, like intensely meaty After Eights, in waxed paper wraps and a rectangular wooden box, to be furled around pickled ginger, fresh mint relish or smoky pepper sauce, each a leathery little pleasure.

I’m also obsessing over xian bing – small round “pancakes” stuffed with minced pork and fried until golden, furiously spurting a broth aromatic with ginger, sesame oil and chives – to the extent that I search videos of people making them, watching with jaw slack, pupils dilated with lust.

Minced ginger and spring onion is scattered on top, then, at the last minute, crisp crumbs of peppery chicken skin, so it retains its crunch.

Rice is swollen with opulent fats: Ibérico pork lard or the almost cheesy funk of aged beef.

There’s a devotion to that curious texture the Taiwanese call Q, or QQ, an alluring, gummy chewiness (think mochi, bubble tea or stiff gnocchi): springy taro dumplings, the gooey interior of that fried pork pancake, the gelatinous bounce of the tendon.

Xu | Restaurants in Chinatown, London

A smart Taiwanese restaurant from the crew behind Bao, with a vintage feel.

It’s one of those narrow, awkward Soho spaces, but the Xu crew have been fairly clever about it, carving up the two small floors into a bundle of mini-spots, each with its own air of intimacy.

There’s a devotion to subtle nuances in texture, layered with the full spectrum of sweet, sour and spice.

Everything I ate was terrific – from a bowl of plump rice with chewy fried onions, to grilled asparagus with the crunch of lily bulbs, to a juicy, sweet, smoky slab of char sui Ibérico pork.

Or the tomato and smoked eel: a stunning cold soup-of-sorts, oscillating between sweet and salty, smoky and tangy, with notes of heat, the delicate texture of Lillipution cubed eel and the fragrant soapiness of coriander stalks.