Xu, London

The Venue

Meriç always manages to find the right place for the right time: and this time it was a Taiwanese restaurant with a menu of exquisite dishes, tucked away in a relatively calm nook of the otherwise chaotic and busy of London's Chinatown.

With snow slowly building up outside, our table by the window offered a perfect backdrop for the dreamy, if slightly colonial, atmosphere inside.

They offer great food, some amazing tea, and overall a wonderful experience.

The Food

Starters

Peanut Lotus Crisps

These were, interesting. I found them a bit bland, (yet ate a few as amuse bouche, because why not), but Meriç enjoyed them more thanks to her more refined palette. Retrospectively, I did enjoy how the still moist (if not juicy) texture of the lotus leaf surprises you after biting into the the crunchy outer layer.

Xian Bing

Now, these minced-meat pancakes (although more like a large dumpling than a pancake IMHO) were properly good. So good we discussed ordering a second, and fought to death with our chopsticks over kindly offering each other the remaining half we initially let linger on the plate out of sheer people-pleaser Turkish manners. The matching sauce offers a great vinegary counterbalance to the juicy and fatty minced meat inside. And the pancakes come with a nice crust from the time they spend getting seared on a pan.

Taro Dumplings

Less exciting than the xian bing, but a good choice if you dig the glossy/sticky type of dumplings and are particularly into off-pink dough-clad Taiwanese sausage.

Main Courses

Shou Pa Chicken

You get the skin fried into a crispy, flavorful form, and the chicken meat itself is perfectly moist, with the drippings providing a wonderful base for it all. A truly great chicken dish, an almost-perfect comfort food in disguise.

Char Shui Iberico Pork

Not worth it.

Dessert

Ma Lai Cake

Quite at home in London with its sticky-toffee-pudding-like vibe, this is even better than that (if I'm allowed to say so). This lovely sponge cake comes with condensed milk and orange butterscotch, and the sticky but light texture of the cake is matched well with these on the side. That is not to say that the cake on its own was bland, to the contrary, it wasn't too sweet but had a delicate honey-like aroma. A great finish to an already quite large dinner.

You have two options for dessert anyway, and the other is ice-cream, and you don't want to be the tourist who goes for ice-cream for lack of imagination. Treat yourself to an adventure and pick the goddamn cake. It's good.

The Drinks

The Cocktails

I forgot what exactly we'd had, need to ask Meriç.

The Tea

Coal Baked 10 Year Oolong

Oh my god. Such a perfect union of deep and textured flavors. Not-overbearingly nutty, sinisterly floral, and pleasantly mushroomy at the same time; it just transcended the whole concept of tea as I had known it. I rarely drink any tea at all, so my opinion isn't worth much, but Meriç is our tea connoisseur and yes she did approve, very animatedly so.