Deep dive into a world of celestial treasures

TABLE FOR TWO Andrew Wong’s new City outpost is focused and assured, says Keith Miller KYM’S £ 100 9/ 10

Unlike every other restaurateur in the UK, who has a “story” on his or her website that, on closer inspection turns out to be some minor variation on having wanted to open a restaurant and then, callooh callay, having done so, Andrew Wong’s story is illuminating – even poignant.

He’d studied at Oxford and the LSE; but on the death of his father he signed up at culinary school, toured China extensively and, in 2012, reopened the family restaurant, formerly named Kym’s after Andrew’s grandmother, as A Wong, with an elegant interior (part Celestial Empire, part Scandi waiting room) and a cool, scholarly, yet always punchy and original take on the cooking of many different regions.

A Wong lies just a buccaneering, Brexit-baiting blogger’s welly toss from the offices of this newspaper. We could practically hear the thwack of righteous vindication when the Michelin inspectors slapped a wellearned star on the gaff – an award they have historically been slow to bestow on Chinese restaurants, in London at least – a year ago.

I couldn’t help but speculate about whether cheffing was always on the cards for Wong. We are at a moment of generational change for members of many migrant communities, to whom back-breaking hospitality work was one of a limited number of options available: such work might not automatically be what parents (who won’t necessarily know that there’s a bit of a buzz around the restaurant business at the moment) would wish for their children.

Then again, there’s a Uk-wide trend for people with a strong tertiary education to pack in their “respectable” white-collar jobs and go off to work in restaurants, like so many Lost Boys, leaping from the windows of their Holland Park villas and throwing in their lot with Peter Pan.

However he got here, Wong’s ca- reer makes a refreshing change from the White Saviour narrative one encounters so often in restaurants at the moment. It’s not that there aren’t Caucasian chefs who are knowledgeable and passionate about their chosen subset of Asian food and, given the sometimes graceless mores of the railway-arch scene, respectful and honourable in their interpretation of it. But Wong just seems to have dived a few fathoms deeper.

The choice of Kym’s as a name for Wong’s new City outpost is a resonant one – it speaks of journeys, homecomings and suchlike. But the room – and the focus of the cooking – is very different from A Wong. It’s a generically tasteful, two-storey space with rough, pink-washed plaster walls, technodeco fittings, bosomy upholstery and a metal staircase winding up around a bar and passing behind a (surely ersatz) flowering tree to a high gallery at the back. A long counter beneath this gives on to an open kitchen, hung with chunks of roast meat, and densely peopled with scurrying chefs.

We ordered in a fairly scattershot way, our efforts to organise things into some course-like configuration good-naturedly batted away by an amiable server. I spotted a few A Wong classics, including one particular favourite, a fiercely spiced bowl of Sichuanese aubergines.

As the zeitgeist dictates, there are a number of hyper-instagramma- ble dishes: a pretty plate of pickled daikon, arranged in a circle and dribbled with chili oil; mushroom dumplings, as soft as any Uruguayan rugby player’s buttock, marbled to resemble actual mushrooms in a faintly Blumenthalian coup de theatre; a sombrerosized prawn cracker, albeit faintly porky or bacony rather than prawny, flecked with nigella seeds and served with “1908 ketchup”. ( This, we wrongly assumed, had been named in honour of the accession of Puyi, the last Emperor of China – in fact we were told it’s the year the first Chinese restaurant opened in London, though that seemed a little late to me.)

There is an emphasis on simple Cantonese roasts and other meat dishes, which can be ordered singly or in a kind of mixed grill, winsomely billed as Three Treasures, and served with a trio of apposite sauces: honey mustard for the crispy pork belly, sweet soy for the char siu pork and a sort of Hainan-style ginger relish for the (celestially good) soy-poached chicken.

Other than that, we noted a succession of bright colours and contrasting textures: honey-glazed lotus root was great once you’ve got used to the idea of eating a loofah; gai lan or Chinese broccoli was scattered with a snowdrift of dried wasabi.

Unexpectedly, maybe, given its location, Kym’s is a shade less spendy than A Wong. I didn’t find the room as stylish as I’d imagined it would be – there was the slight sense that if this one does well, they’re poised to roll out more, and they want something they can install easily and cheaply in an unfinished shell.

It’s less didactic, less “curated” than its elder sibling, too – everything is done with assurance and verve, and a deep clarity of purpose, but there’s nothing particularly elaborate or unfamiliar. Still, I’d happily go back and order an entirely different set of dishes: the crispy noodles and the Xi’an-style “lamb burger” winked at me, to name but two.

My date this time was Kathryn, my alter-ego on this page, who I’d never met IRL. I had worried we’d sit there with pursed lips and bat recherché adjectives across the table at each other. But in the event we talked about piers, GCSES, marble, magazines and all sorts of things, really. There’s nothing worse than going for lunch with someone and just talking about the food.