Dim sum, duck and confusion
Food in London confuses me. Not all of it, but a lot of it.
It’s the hyped-upness of food that confuses me. How certain places become so popular, their tables so sought after. That’s what social media does, I guess. But what confuses me is that so often the hype doesn’t live up to expectations. And so, I start to wonder whether it’s really the food that people care about, or is it the allure of some kind of made-up, strange prestige associated with securing a table at whatever’s deemed to be the latest and greatest spot?
On Wednesday night we went to Dim Sum Duck on King’s Cross Road. It’s allegedly one of the best spots in London for, as its name suggests, dim sum, and roast duck. We’d tried to go twice before - once on a Saturday when we didn’t expect a queue, nor have time to join it, and again on a Sunday when we anticipated a queue, spent forty minutes in it and then gave up.
I had been to Dim Sum Duck for lunch on Tuesday when I worked from home. I arrived to no queue, and was immediately sat at a table with a man who was dining on his own and who I’d never met before. With the exception of me apologising for gate crashing his lunch (not that I had any choice in the matter), we didn’t talk to one another - he sat with headphones on, talking on the phone while he ate (gross), and I scrolled Instagram and searched for cheap flights on Skyscanner while I waited for my food to arrive. I had prawn and chive dumplings and prawn and bean curd cheung fun. I thought both dishes were excellent. The dumplings were salty and oniony, the cheung fun sweet and plump with lots of crispy bean curd and juicy prawn. I sent Phil a text and said we definitely had to go sometime.
And so we decided to go back on Wednesday night. We arrived to a smaller queue of six people, and decided we’d wait it out. We waited for just under an hour. A long time.
We ordered the same dumplings and cheung fun I’d had the day before, as well as a plate of crispy deep fried prawn wontons with salad cream, stir fried broccoli and the crispy duck pancakes with hoisin sauce, cucumber and spring onion.
The broccoli arrived first. A strange dish to start the meal with, and stranger that there was a big gap between us finishing the broccoli and our next plates of food arriving. The broccoli was mediocre - over-cooked, oily and lacking in flavour. The choi sum that the woman sitting next to us had ordered looked better. The prawn dumplings and cheung fun were as good as they’d been the day before, and of course the deep fried wontons were good - anything deep fried usually is. The duck pancakes were disappointing. The duck was dry and the pancakes were under-cooked.
The service was perfunctory, something which I even overheard the restaurant’s owner acknowledging to the diners at the table next to us: “People come here for the food, which is great, not the service.”
They played really loud music, which didn’t bother me, but the fact it was mostly One Direction songs did.
These kinds of places often present mixed bag menus - some good dishes, some average ones, some that are rubbish, and that was what we got. On the whole, it was fine, but really, it was average. Though it struck me as interesting that I’d enjoyed it so much more the day before. Perhaps that was because I’d not had to wait a long time to get my food, and because I’d ordered some of the better dishes on the menu.
Phil and I both acknowledged on our walk home that we can be hard task masters, and that years of eating Le Zhong’s food at The Beijing has ruined us, but the truth is, what we got wasn’t worth waiting close to sixty minutes for. As Phil rightly said, he’s had better food at Wong Kei in Chinatown. A restaurant where you can go, walk in, get a table, eat food, linger over a Tsingtao, pay, and leave again, all within the amount of time we spent queuing for mediocre duck, terrible broccoli and pretty good dim sum. But somehow, someone has deemed Dim Sum Duck to be more worth your while.
This is what confuses me about London food.
