Hakkasan: For A Very Festive (& Glamorous) Chinese New Year!

Words & Photography by Matthew Brown and Luiz Hara

Name: Hakkasan

Where: 8 Hanway Place, London, W1T 1HD, http://hakkasan.com/

Cost: The number eight is lucky in Chinese culture - and Hakkasan’s Chinese New Year dishes are all centred on this number. The 9-course Signature Sharing Menu is priced at £88.88 per person, including a special festive treat, and is available for groups of three or more. Other New Year dishes are priced comparatively with the a la carte menu, with starters and small dishes from £12.88 to £18.88, and a main dish of Abalone and Dried Scallop Fried Rice, £23.88. 

Hakkasan has an impressive and varied drinks selection - most cocktails from the room-length bar are £12.50, and a New Year special, the Kumquatcha, is £11.88. Most wines are priced at £40 and above, but thankfully many are also available by the glass, both 175ml and 250ml. 

About: The Hakkasan Group is a formidable force in Chinese cuisine, with restaurants in New York, Las Vegas, Mumbai and Shanghai, as well as London. Opened in 2001, Hanway Place was the first Hakkasan, awarded a Michelin star in 2003, it has always been my no.1 favourite restaurant for dim sum and Chinese fine dining in London (reviewed here). 

Hakkasan’s design is as striking and innovative as when it first opened 14 years ago. The Christian Liaigre interior is atmospheric, with beautiful wooden screens and hanging birdcages. The 16-metre bar supplies great cocktails, and gives the dining room a glam atmosphere.

Tong Chee Hwee, Executive Chef at HKK, whose Chinese New Year Menu we reviewed just a week ago (see review here), has also been in charge of Hanway Place since its launch. Thankfully, this means that the two New Year menus he has created are very different, but equally delicious. As you enter the restaurant, the handwritten wishes of other diners hang above you, and the Celebration Menu includes a special secret element! 

What We Ate: Our meal began with a Dim Sum Platter, featuring a scallop shumai and dumplings made with Chinese chive and celery and prawn. We rank Hakkasan as one of London’s best Dim Sum venues, and this trilogy was a reminder why. The scallop was soft and flaked away on the tongue, a rare achievement as they can so easily turn hard and chewy. Elsewhere, the chive and celery flavours gave their respective dumplings a light and fresh flavour, ideal for a first course.

These were followed by a Spicy Lamb Lupin Wrap, served with Hakkasan’s own Hoi Sin Sauce. This was a special alternative to traditional Peking duck and pancakes for 2015, the year of the goat/sheep. The crunchy wrap was cut into easy-to-share pieces, and the lamb filling was mixed with spring onion and chilli, giving it a gorgeous aroma.

The third and final starter, golden fried soft shell crab, was served with an incredible nest of egg floss that added to the crab’s delicate bite. This dish, glistening with a sweet glaze and topped with a curry leaf, is exactly the kind of thing you leave the house to eat - complex and satisfying at the same time.

The five different main courses arrived at once, and were served to share. Spicy prawns, served with almond and lily bulb, were thick and fleshy. The curry sauce in which they were served was just enough to give them a creamy but intense heat.

Stir-fried black pepper beef was soft and untextured, lacking the bite and crunch of the prawns. The merlot and black pepper sauce was rich and sweet, however, and the beautiful vermicelli cone in which it was served add some needed texture.

Better still was the grilled Chilean sea bass in honey, its soft flesh glistened under the marinated skin. The stir-fried lily bulb and garlic shoot was a great accompaniment, it was crunchy with fried chilli and salty with soy; utterly addictive.

The best, though, was the abalone and dry scallop fried rice. Beautifully creamy, and with the clean, salty flavour of the scallop and the softness of the abalone, this is a very special dish indeed. If you visit and don’t opt for the Celebration menu, then don’t fail to order a bowl of this succulent rice to accompany your meal.

The theatricality stepped up a gear with dessert. A wishing tree arrived with two bright orange caramelised macadamia nuts hanging from it and an envelope containing a gift from Hakkasan to each diner!

The plate itself was decorated with a dusted cocoa tree, alongside servings of chocolate ganache, kumquat sorbet and cocoa rocks. The mixture of cocoa and citrus works beautifully, and the kumquat flavour and biscuity cocoa are truly innovative elements.

What We Drank: We began the meal with a Kumquatcha, a cocktail made with Brazilian cachaça, campari, kumquats and lime. This is the perfect drink for lovers of caipirinhas, with the kumquats adding a whole new level of flavour and colour.

For the wine, we ordered a 2013 Albarino “Marinero” Terras Gauda from Rias Baixas in Spain. The combination of roundness and acidity makes the Albarino grape a suitable match for both seafood and Chinese cooking, and it is no surprise to find it on the wine lists of many top Chinese restaurants.

We ended with a dessert wine - a glass of the Tokaji Late Harvest ‘Bodvin’, with a wishing tree on the table, we couldn’t resist the urge to celebrate! This is a complex glass, and the notes of oak, honey and apricot added new elements to an already fantastic final course.

Likes: This Chinese New Year Celebration Menu is a fantastic chance to try some of Hakkasan’s best dishes (the dim sum and garlic shoot and lily bulb especially) alongside an incredible new dish, the abalone and dry scallop fried rice.

Dislikes: None. 

Verdict: The Chinese New Year Celebration Menu is a great way to experience Hakkasan, with the atmosphere at its warmest and a strong selection of its best dishes available to share. It’s a fantastic insight into the power of the traditional elements of Chinese New Year, from kumquats to abalone, to public wishes and surprise presents, all of which combine to offer real festivity. 

Celebrating the Year of the Sheep at Yauatcha!

Words & Photography by Greg Klerkx and Luiz Hara

Name: Yauatcha

Where: 15-17 Broadwick Street, London W1F 0DL, http://www.yauatcha.com/

Cost: The Chinese New Year menu at Yauatcha features through 28 February, costing £70.50 per person (including Yang Walker cocktail).

About: The Year of the Sheep is nearly upon us, and there’ll be no shortage of Chinese restaurants in London offering special fare to ring in the New Year. Few are likely to match Soho’s venerable Yauatcha for quality, cleverness and value.

Yauatcha has long been a go-to place for top quality Chinese food, particularly for dim sum and its award-winning handmade sweets. It is also a favourite haunt of mine reviewed here last year. Created by Alan Yau, the man who also launched the high-flying Hakkasan (reviewed here) with HKK being the latest addition to the group (reviewed here), Yauatcha is one of a handful of Chinese restaurants in London to have earned a Michelin star, which it has held for nearly a decade. Under head chef Tong Chee Hwee, the restaurant continues to be one of Soho’s most popular: we dined on a cold, bleak Tuesday evening and the restaurant was packed from start to finish.

The Chinese New Year Menu at Yauatcha (through 28th February 2015) offers a comfortable tour through the dishes that have made the restaurant’s reputation, though in truth it’s less a menu – each dish is priced a la carte – than a carefully curated package: some dim sum, some wok dishes, and the inevitably sweet (and delicious) finish. If you’ve never been to Yauatcha, the menu is an excellent way to ensure that you’ll want to come again.

What We Ate: Our meal used the Chinese New Year Menu as a starting point, with the joy of several additional dishes showing up at unpredictable intervals along the way. The first dish wasn’t on the Chinese New Year Menu: Baked venison puff (£5), a char siu dish that substituted barbecued venison for the more usual minced pork filling, to good effect; the puff pastry was flaky and flavourful, the sesame notes delicate but clear.

Szechuan dumplings (£4.95) were also not on the New Year menu, though they should be: the dumplings were melt-in-your-mouth and moreish, the pork filling tender and moist, the Szechuan sauce packed with zing. They also rather overshadowed the Goldfish dumplings (£6.80) that followed, which were on the menu. They were cute to look at, but far more plain on the palate.

Prawn and bean curd cheung fun (£8.00) was another off-menu treat. Much as a Thai restaurant’s reputation lives or dies by its Pad Thai, one can gauge the quality of a Chinese restaurant on the strength of its cheung fun, a ubiquitous dish in China made from rice noodles, rolled until almost translucent, and typically filled with fish, meat and/or vegetables and served with a sweet soy sauce.

In the wrong hands, cheung fun can be glutinous or sticky, the filling grainy or flavourless. No such problems at Yauatcha: the thin rice roll was velvety and smooth, the prawn filling rich and flavourful. The bean curd was lightly fried and wrapped between the rice roll and prawn, giving the cheung fun a wonderful, and unusual, crunch.  It was a highlight of the meal, and not to be missed. Next, we had a gorgeously presented steamed dumplings of prawns and tobiko eggs.

At this point in our meal, the Chinese New Year Menu reasserted itself with two excellent wok dishes. Mongolian lamb chop (£18.80) was sticky, smoky and fall-off-the-chop tender, and presented a strong case for foregoing utensils for fingers, the better to clean each chop of every bit of deliciousness.

Even better were the fried prawn balls with salted egg yolk (£17.80), which were positively decadent, the salted egg yolk infusing the crisped prawn filling with a deep, almost earthy flavour.

Here, the Chinese New Year Menu was to have moved onto dessert but we ordered two additional dishes to finish our savoury course with a bit of heat. Soft-shell crab with almond (£13.50) served its signature ingredient lightly-fried on a generous bed of spiced almond slivers, which allows the diner to effectively decide how much heat they desired with each bite of perfectly judged crab.

Spicy aubergine, sato bean, okra and French bean with peanut (£12.20) was our only purely vegetarian dish of the evening, though Yauatcha offers a good selection therein. Its heat punch was more pervasive than that of the crab, but the dish had such depth of flavour  - the strong, somewhat acidic sato bean played a big role here – that the spice never overwhelmed.

It could hardly be a Year of the Sheep menu without that lucky beast popping up somewhere, and Yauatcha served up not one but two sheepish desserts. Dulce de leche macarons (£1.80) were delightful: caramelised sheep’s milk coated with oats, crispy and chewy in exactly the proportions one would hope for. Sheep’s milk yoghurt bavarois (£8.80) was less successful. It was beautiful to look at and the lemon curd filling was fresh and tangy. But as a whole, there wasn’t quite enough dynamic range to this dish, either in taste or texture.

It would have been a disappointment to end on this slightly down note, but fortunately Fried sweet black sesame ball (£5.50) was an absolute stunner: crisp, perfectly formed balls of sesame-coated pastry, giving way to a warm, oozing sweet black sesame centre…a delightful finish.

What We Drank: We began with the menu’s signature cocktail, the Yang Walker (£11), a mellow and complex concoction of rosemary, lime, grapefruit juice, Johnnie Walker Black label whisky, ginger bitters, plum sake with a hint of Baijiu, a popular Chinese spirit usually made from sorghum, and which added a woody, smoky note.

Yauatcha features a strong wine list, and a bottle of The Navigator, Alpha Domus (2009, New Zealand; £40) possessed firm tannins and deep tobacco and blackberry notes that worked well across most of the dishes we had, not least the spicier offerings. 

Likes: the prawn and beancurd cheung fun as well as the fried prawn balls with salted egg yolk are not to be missed!

Dislikes: None.

Verdict: The Chinese New Year menu at Yauatcha features through the 28th February 2015, costing £70.50 per person (including Yang Walker cocktail) if you just order the items on the menu. You might want to add an extra dish here or there depending on your appetite, but Yauatcha’s clever, precise food is sure to launch your Year of the Sheep in delicious style.

The Fabulous 10-Course Chinese New Year Menu at HKK - A Culinary Journey Through China

Words & Photography by Matthew Brown and Luiz Hara

Name: HKK

Where: 88 Worship Street, London EC2A 2BE, http://hkklondon.com/

Cost: HKK is a banqueting restaurant, and in the evening diners choose between different tasting menus. Until the end of February, there will be two Chinese New Year menus, of 8- and 10- courses, priced at £68 and £98. Full vegetarian alternatives are offered for both, and a wine flight is available for an additional £58.

At lunchtime diners are able to order additional courses from the à la carte menu (most starters are around £15, and main courses, £30). There’s also a 4-course lunch menu for £29, or £48 with an additional course of the restaurant’s signature black truffle duck.

About: HKK is the newest London restaurant from the Hakkasan Group; it opened in December 2012 and received a Michelin star the following year. It is located in the City, and despite having a more corporate atmosphere than the other Hakkasan restaurants, it’s also more theatrical.

Having worked for 11 years at the Hakkasan restaurants, the group's Executive Head Chef Tong Chee Hwee wanted HKK to tell the story of Chinese cooking. The immaculately clean open kitchen and carving table in the centre of the room allow diners to marvel at the preparation of the food; and with choice in the evening restricted to the exquisitely presented tasting menus, no-one escapes this culinary theatre.

Until the 28th February 2015, HKK is celebrating Chinese New Year (the year of the Sheep) with a culinary journey through China. The menu pays homage to the eight culinary traditions of China with courses focusing on the dishes of each of the provinces, from the mountainous Anhui Province to the coastal regions of Jiangsu and the cosmopolitan city of Beijing in Shandong, followed by two unique desserts.

What We Ate: The meal began with two small cubes of marinated pork and Osmanthus wine jelly. The smoky flavour of the meat, offset by the tartness of the jelly, gave a glimpse of the combination of richness and delicacy that would characterise this journey through the cuisines of China’s eight most important culinary regions.

Things accelerated dramatically with the second course: cherry-wood roasted Peking duck, served 3 ways. Beautifully arranged, the trilogy was comprised of very crispy skin, sliced breast and a rolled pancake, every piece of which melted on the tongue, helped by a simple accompaniment of brown sugar and hoi sin sauce. This was an outstanding dish and possibly our favourite of the entire menu. HKK offers a 5-course duck lunch menu for £48 which includes their signature dish "HKK black truffle slow cooked duck" I am now dying to try!

Our crispy duck course being plated up!

This was followed by another trilogy - of dim sum made with crab, prawn & goji berry, and truffle chicken. In order not to drown their flavour, we were given brushes to paint the dumplings with soy sauce, rather than dip them. Sadly, this lightness of touch did not extend to the dumpling cases, which we felt were a tad too thick for their fillings. The fillings themselves were excellent though - the crab was rich and creamy, and the goji berry was the base for an excellent sauce.

Next was the soup course - named Monk Jumps Over the Wall, after a Buddhist monk who was said to have been so enticed by the smell that he jumped over a wall just to try it. This dish offered a beguiling combination of textures - from the soft sponge of sea cucumber to fleshy mushroom, suspended in a broth delicately balanced between warming umami and sharp acidity.

This was followed by pan-grilled Chilean seabass in a Sha Cha sauce. Though grilled, the seabass was moist and soft, and served wrapped around spring onions and chilli, giving an enjoyable crunch at the centre.

Served in a stack, the Jasmine tea smoked poussin in a truffle sauce was served with the soft breast meat mixed with crispy skin - ensuring that every mouthful was as smoky and aromatic as the last.

At this point the meal seemed to have reached its climax, however it took a dramatic swerve into the very different cuisines of Zhejiang and Szechuan. A course of braised King Soy Wagyu beef with merlot was at once both strange and familiar. Thanks to the soy marinade and the marbled fat of the beef, the sauce was sweeter and more luxurious than we anticipated.

The following course, Szechuan char-grilled scampi, was totally different. Sweetness was replaced with the dry-heat of Szechuan pepper, and a sauce of great lightness. The dish’s admirable achievement was to maintain just the right level of spice from the Szechuan pepper, without interfering with the meaty flavours of the thick New Zealand scampi.

The desserts were similarly light and refreshing. A trio of dark chocolate dumplings was served in a ginger and yuzu infusion that cut through the rich cocoa with a sweet sharpness.

The three beautiful pink dumplings had all of the freshness of their colour, and none of the heaviness typical of a chocolate pudding.

Likewise, a sheep’s milk mousse served with pandan curd sorbet was bracingly tart and gorgeously presented.

What We Drank: We began with two very different drinks from the creative and distinctly Chinese cocktail list. 

The French Quarter - served hot or cold - combined the floral qualities of Hennessey Fine De Cognac with Cynar (an artichoke spirit), cinnamon and cloves to create a warming aromatic drink, whilst the Bitter Fortune was a delightfully zingy aperitif made from pink grapefruit, No.10 Tanqueray gin, Aperol and rhubarb liqueur among other ingredients.

Facing the challenge of complementing a very varied menu, the drinks pairing selection was not always consistent. It began with a Yang Walker - a small cocktail made using the astringent Chinese spirit baiju and Johnnie Walker Black Label. The resulting taste was original, both woody and sherberty, but despite the mixologist’s best efforts, the baiju’s near-toxic aroma will, I think, still be too strong for many. 

Better was the first wine, a 2013 Pinot Noir from Stepp, in Pfalz. Unusually deep in colour and rich in berries but still light and dry, it went well with the pork and even better with the duck, standing up to their aromatic flavours.

The dim sum course was paired with a small serving of the Bitter Fortune, which, though refreshing, felt like a step backwards - who, once the wine flight begins, wants to get off? 

We were glad for the next glass, a 2011 Chardonnay from Ramey in California. Golden in colour, this wine was warm with cinnamon and spice, matching the sweet Sha Cha sauce, but still dry enough to cut through it and complement the fish. The Jasmine-smoked poussin was served with sake - the exceptionally dry and traditional Dewazakura ‘Izumi Judan’ Ginjo. This was an inspired deviation from the grape, adding new aromas to one of the meal’s most powerful dishes.

The next wine - a 2010 Chateau Simone - had to do the job of standing up to the dark soy Wagyu and hot Szechuan scampi. The sandalwood and mushroom notes of this Old World blend gave depth, but a balanced acidity gave it the sharpness to match the seafood.

The final wine, a Vajra Moscato d’Asti, was  vibrantly sparkling and sweet, with notes of peach and apricot. 

Likes: This 10-course tasting menu really does provide a journey - through very different regional cuisines, with some exceptional dishes such as Peking Duck and Szechuan scampi. Diners aren’t only educated, they are also given control over many of the dishes - able to add sweetness and acidity to taste. 

Dislikes: Although I loved the wine flight, the mixture of wine with cocktails and hard spirits feels less of a good idea the morning after.  

Verdict: HKK’s Chinese New Year Tasting Menu offers a great opportunity to enjoy some of the city’s best and most indulgent Chinese cooking, whilst learning more about the country’s cuisine. With January now over, this is a chance to celebrate New Year all over again, and in fantastic style. 

Goode & Wright or Bad and Wrong - Find Out Here.

Name: Goode & Wright

Where: 271 Portobello Road, London W11 1LR, http://www.goodeandwright.co.uk/

Cost: Small plates start at £6.50, and main courses are priced from £14.50, with side dishes at £3. White wines start at £20.50 for a Chardonnay Vin de Pays d'Oc, and reds at £22.50 for a George Duboeuf Beaujolais Villages. There is a vintage Champagne at £45. 

About: Goode & Wright is an intimate restaurant of around 30 covers on Portobello Road, opened in 2011, this is the brain child of chef Findley Logan and Alex Herb (an former chef himself, formerly of the Ealing Tavern) being now the front of house man. The restaurant has an olde-worlde feel about it, but in a very tasteful way, with wood panels on the walls and beautifully tiled black and white floor.

The menu changes daily, and is based around 12 small plates, and 6 main courses. The name of the restaurant comes from Goode & Wright tailors, who ran their business on the premises pre-WW2, and whose name plate is still visible outside the restaurant.

Deserted when we arrived at 7.20pm on a Friday evening, the place was heaving by 8.30pm, with a young and well-heeled clientele. Goode and Wright is open for lunch and dinner for six days a week, but in 2015 they plan to open 7 days a week. It is evidently the place to enjoy lunch on Saturday when Portobello Market is in full swing, but be sure to reserve a table in advance.

What We Ate: We started with Devon crab with chicharron and avocado (£9). Chicharron is pork skin, deep-fried until crispy. The crab was flavoured with fresh dill and a fragrant dill oil, and served with a mayonnaise of brown crab meat. We loved the flavours in this dish and felt it was very well conceived and executed.

Next came beef tartare, with capers, truffle and watercress (£9.50). The restaurant's meat is supplied by Devon Rose butchers, and it tasted fresh and of great quality. With hand chopped tender beef, flavoured with tarragon mustard, capers and a generous serving of fresh truffle shavings, this was delicious and incredibly well priced in our opinion. The presentation though looked a tad busy and the ingredients squashed into the small plate didn’t show the dish in its best light.

I loved eating bone-marrow, so the bone-marrow toasties on the menu had to be ordered. Nothing I’d had before though prepared me for what came next - two massive bones were brought to the table served with toasted sourdough bread and tarragon mustard (£7). They were huge! Served with dinky metal skewers with tiny spoons at the end to scoop the deliciously flavoured marrow-fat onto the toast, Dr G and I enjoyed our bones thoroughly and got our cravings for bone-marrow appeased for at least another year! They were great.

The duck egg in a basket, with chorizo (£9.50) was served with a truffle honey glaze.  It consisted of a baked egg with a still slightly runny yolk, in the middle of a substantial slab of fried bread, topped with slices of fried chorizo.

I think I would have probably loved this dish, had I not eaten copious amounts of bread in my other two starters. The flavours were great - I loved the combination of runny egg yolk, chorizo and fried bread and would love to try this again with a green salad, and not much else.

Next up was the blackened octopus with pickled radish and pomegranate (£9.50). This was an excellent dish and beautifully presented - the octopus was very tender and the flavours were well balanced (the pickled radish added a refreshing acidity), the flavours were punchy with a lovely chargrilled flavour from the octopus.

By this stage, we were quite full, but managed to squeeze in a Bergamot posset, with strawberry Eton mess (£5.50). This was light and delicious, and a perfect end to our meal.

What We Drank: We shared a bottle of Le Petit Xavier, from the Languedoc (£31). Purple-tinged, this had good red berry fruit flavours, but was a little thin and acidic on the finish. At this price level, I would have expected a wine with a little more va-va-voom (structure).

Likes: Goode & Wright has a vibrant feel, and is well located for those in or visiting Notting Hill. I loved their selection of small eats - honest food, well cooked and packed with flavour.

Dislikes: Avoid eating every bit of bread you are served is my recommendation.

Verdict: Goode & Wright offers a great selection of small eats that change daily. The food is fresh, expertly cooked and has tons of flavour. But most importantly, it will not break the bank. I loved it and will return. Highly recommended.