This past Monday was Chinese New Year (gong hei fat choi!) which ushered in the auspicious year of the dragon. To celebrate, I was invited to a bloggers dinner at Ping Pong (St Paul’s branch on Bread St) to try the Chinese New Year menu.

A modern, ‘Westernised’, dim sum house, Ping Pong is pitched as serving dim sum with a twist. I quite like Ping Pong because this chain of dim sum eateries is fun. Ping Pong might not be the first place that springs to mind for traditional dim sum eating, but they exude a chilled out contemporary vibe which makes the eating experience pleasant. Also I delight in drinking their flowering teas which bloom as the tea brews, the effect of which is visually arresting.

We tried a number of dishes from The Chinese New Year menu which is available until 6 February. Starting with a sweet basil seafood soup (£3.95) in a tom yum Thai-style – the soup wasn’t particularly spicy, but it was tasty for its sweetness. However the mussels in it were not good.

Sweet basil seafood soup

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For a taste of nightclub dining, I recently tried Tamarai at their invitation. Billed as a pan-Asian restaurant and bar, it also morphs into a club at 11pm with a DJ and a 3am licence.

As befits a nightclub, the décor is dark and dimly lit with lots of well spaced plush seating. But it felt a little tired and probably could do with some refreshing.

Caramelised Szechuan pepper king prawns (£16) was seductively good for the fat, meaty and tasty jumbo-sized prawns. There wasn’t anything particularly Szechuanese about the dish, no real hint of heat or spiciness, but there was a lovely sweetness coming through from the caramelisation effect.

Caramelised Szechuan pepper king prawns

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Tim Raue

Restaurant Tim Raue, a one star Michelin restaurant in Berlin, is named after its executive chef, Tim Raue who has gained fame in Germany for his unusual approach to Asian cooking. His style is best explained on the restaurant’s website as ‘Asian cuisine characterised as a combination of Japanese product perfection, Thai aromas and Chinese cooking philosophy’. Raue came from rough and humble beginnings. His abusive upbringing and time spent in a gang as a youth is common knowledge in Germany – he’s also just brought out an autobiography. But despite this, he’s still managed to achieve success by winning a Michelin star and the Gault Millau Chef of the Year award in 2007.

What is also interesting about the food at Restaurant Tim Raue is that it does not use any dairy products or complex carbohydrates. Raue’s philosophy is that you should be able to eat a full meal and feel full of energy afterwards. Therefore you will not see any potatoes or rice on the menu. Not serving rice is not an Oriental concept. Even the word for ‘meal’ in Cantonese literally translates as ‘eating rice’. But ok.

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Note:
Ooops. It appears that I got it wrong and that Bo Innovation was demoted to a one-star in the 2010 Guide which I think came out in December.
But I concluded that this wasn’t a two-star worthy meal. So in that respect I got something right…

On a recent visit to Hong Kong I went to Bo Innovation, a two-star Michelin restaurant, and the 65th ranked restaurant in the 2010 San Pellegrino’s Best Restaurants in the World list. The ‘World’s Best’ website describes Bo Innovation “as a ground breaking Chinese fine-dining restaurant, serving ‘X-Treme Chinese’ cuisine, with executive chef Alvin Leung known around the world for his sense of adventure, humour and rock and roll”. Bo Innovation is known for its molecular reinvention of traditional Chinese and I was certifiably curious. I grew up eating Chinese food, and I’ve had molecular gastronomy many times over, but never the two combined, so this was going to be my first foray into this new dimension.

The restaurant is modern and sleek. There are no traditional Chinese touches here, no red lanterns or the like. Instead there are bare floors and industrial looking walls. The only hint that this might be a Chinese restaurant is the occasion splash of marble.

There are three menu choices at Bo Innovation. The standard tasting menu offers nine course,s including a choice of main from five options, and is priced at HK$780 (about £62). We selected the ‘Chef’s’ tasting with 14 courses which is priced at HK$1,280 (about £102). There is also the ‘Chef’s Table’ menu with 16 courses which is priced at HK$1,680 (about £133).

Although bread is typically not served with a Chinese meal, as a substitute for bread (so explained our waiter), we were offered ‘egg waffles’ with Iberico ham. Made from waffle batter and cooked so that they are shaped like little eggs (hence the translation to egg waffles), this is a variation of a typical Hong Kong street food (which I recently discovered being sold in London’s Chinatown). A childhood favourite of mine when I use to live in Hong Kong, it tastes slightly sweet. The use of Iberico ham added a touch of savouriness to the waffle and was very tasty.

Egg waffles

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Nyonya use to be one of my favourite cheap-eats in London. Great food is always hard to pass up, and when combined with cheap prices, makes it even harder to beat. As a bit of an ex-regular, I couldn’t help but lament Nyonya’s closing. I suspect the exorbitant Notting Hill rental prices must have had something to do with it.

But the people behind it came back to open up Sedap (which means delicious in Malayan) in Old Street about a year ago. The location is far less glamorous than Notting Hill, but the menu prices have remained cheap. The downside is that it’s harder for me to get to and I no longer call myself a regular. So this was my first visit since it opened up as Sedap, and I must say, it was definitely worth the wait.

We started with kerabu prawns (£6.50), a fresh, crunchy salad of prawns and cucumber finished with a kerabu dressing. Loving the combination of sweet, sour and salty flavours that are a hallmark of a kerabu, we polished this off in minutes. Finely chopped peanuts and black fungus added crunchiness to the salad, and the chilli gave it a nice little kick.

Kerabu prawns

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