Good morning and welcome back to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. Due to a glitch, yesterday’s newsletter was sent to only some subscribers. As a result, we are re-sending it today, with apologies to those of you who receive it twice as a result.

The piece, by Barclay Bram, looks at how the recent influx of Chinese international students is producing new Chinatowns across the length and breadth of the UK, and how a simple change in university policy has fundamentally altered what British towns and cities eat.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

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From his corner of the restaurant, Ma Teng can look across the dining room, surveying the steady flow of customers into his business. With a subtle turn of the head, he can peer through the floor-to-ceiling windows and out at London’s Chinatown. Even at 5pm on a Wednesday in February – when we sit to eat – it is already heaving with people. We’re in the flagship of Jinli, a restaurant chain that, over the last decade, has spread across the UK. Today, it has seven branches countrywide, and specialises in Sichuanese food, with an emphasis on 家常菜 – home-style cooking.

Martin (as he prefers to be known) started off working for Yin Fei, the founder of the restaurant, eventually taking over the restaurant’s ownership from him. At the entrance to Jinli, he proudly displays all the awards he has won. There are awards from Chinese platforms like Dazhong Dianping, Xiao Hongshu and HungryPanda. Chinese state television broadcaster CCTV-2 has named his grilled fish the most popular Sichuanese dish in the UK. According to the Chinese Student and Scholars Association (CSSA), Jinli has been rated the most popular with Chinese exchange students for four years in a row. This, too, is evidenced by an award on the wall.

But despite all of these successes, the outlook from Martin’s vantage point is not good. ‘I want people to understand exactly what we’re going through at the moment,’ he tells me. He is frank about the challenges his restaurants face: ‘Brexit, the war in Ukraine, price shocks from all kinds of geopolitical instability,’ he says, rattling off a litany of recent bad-news headlines. But there’s a bigger problem. ‘We’re caught in the middle of two bad economies,’ he says. Britain’s economy is stagnant. But so is China’s. ‘The students,’ he says, looking forlornly out of the window, ‘they don’t have money any more.’

The impact that the mass migration of Chinese students has had on UK food culture should be obvious to anyone who has seen HungryPanda delivery drivers zip through red lights, who has marvelled at the diversity and number of bubble tea stores, or who has noticed the upscaling of Asian supermarkets in recent years. It has propelled the fortunes of people like Martin, who rode the wave of Chinese students seeking a taste of home. Martin targets cities with a solid number of affluent Chinese students, but where the competition isn’t as fierce as in cities like Manchester or Birmingham. ‘In Exeter, we have no competition. Our brand is much stronger than everyone else’s, and no one is there to drive our prices down.’

This mass migration has allowed regional Chinese cooking to proliferate outside of London, particularly in small university towns. But it has also done something else – it has exploded the very concept of Chinatown. With university towns around the UK catering to this influx of new money and seeing their high streets thrive, it begs an important question: who needs a Chinatown?

Chinese food in Europe has never just been the preserve of Chinatowns. But in many major port cities in the UK, Chinatowns became important venues for the immigrant Chinese community. Liverpool’s Chinatown grew out of the silk trade with Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century. London’s original Chinatown, in Docklands, was bombed out in the Second World War, dispersing its residents. They gradually found their way to central London, buoyed by waves of migration from Hong Kong. What we think of as Chinatown today – in Soho – was designated as such by the council in 1985. Its food scene has always been predominantly Cantonese, or cooking based loosely on Cantonese cuisine. As a child, I used to go to Chuen Cheng Ku, delighted by the restaurant’s dim sum trolleys. It’s now a Brazilian rodizio.

Over the years, the food of Chinatowns in the UK not only reflected these waves of migration, but also the kinds of foods that might find broad appeal with locals. The food became sweeter, more fried. Chinese restaurant associations helped restaurateurs to source ingredients and recipes and to hire chefs, which standardised an idea of what ‘Chinese’ food was for British people.

By the 2010s, this idea started to change, driven by a new wave of immigration from mainland China. 2015, the year that Martin started working at Jinli, was dubbed ‘the golden era’ of Sino-British relations by then Chancellor George Osborne. In the same year, Xi Jinping addressed parliament and drank ale in a British pub in Buckinghamshire (which was subsequently bought by a Chinese entrepreneur). He also found time to stop by Imperial College to give an address to students, which made sense, given the university had over 2,000 Chinese students at the time.

Throughout that decade, Chinese students played a major role in sustaining British higher education. Despite the British government hiking tuition fees for domestic students to £9,000 in 2012, the university sector could not support itself without also charging substantially higher fees for international students. So, the government attempted a sleight of hand: foreign students would now subsidise domestic ones. Britain was attractive to Chinese students – its tuition was still significantly more affordable than America’s, visas were easier to come by, and the politics less fraught. When Xi Jinping addressed Imperial College, the Chinese students in the audience were paying £26,000 a year in tuition fees alone.

By the 2019/2020 academic year, there were over 100,000 first-year Chinese undergraduates enrolled in UK higher education – the first time any foreign nation had supplied a six-figure student cohort. This supplied approximately £2.5 billion in fees. British higher education had found a way to support itself through Conservative-era austerity: a seemingly endless supply of Chinese students, happy to spend lavishly to study at world-class universities that taught in English. That year, 48% of first-year non-UK domiciled students at UK universities were from mainland China. At some universities, mainland Chinese students made up over half the undergraduate international student population, including at UCL, Imperial and Sheffield. Also that year, the University of Liverpool, close to the home of the first Chinese enclave in Europe, had an international undergraduate population that was 66% Chinese.

The Sinification of higher education in the past decade has led to the satirical Chinese phrase ‘fanxiang liuxue’ 反向留学 – ‘to study abroad in reverse’, whereby Chinese students arrive in a country like the UK and find themselves surrounded by Chinese students, taught by Chinese professors and eating Chinese food. The proliferation of delivery apps like Fantuan and HungryPanda has allowed Chinese students a semblance of the slick convenience of home – though for a significant price increase. Apps like Douyin (China’s censored version of TikTok) and Xiao Hongshu enable students to share recipes and tips about where to eat or buy things that remind them of home. On WeChat, you can watch the influencer Bai Wasai walk you through the aisles of Lidl, converting the prices of items into RMB before walking back to his student dorm in Glasgow to prepare dishes such as hand-pulled noodles with braised beef.

It’s not just that Chinese students have brought their tastes to the UK; at the same time, the underlying business of food has also shifted. In 2017, Kelu ‘Eric’ Liu founded HungryPanda while still a student at the University of Nottingham, where he was studying Computer Science and Management. He served the large Chinese community in and around Nottingham (the university has a campus in Ningbo in East China, and many programmes involve exchanges between the sister campuses). HungryPanda has now expanded to eighty cities and is worth roughly $500 million. Where Chinatowns once worked as a space to centralise everything a restaurateur would need – ingredients, staff and a customer base – today the internet performs the same function. HungryPanda doesn’t just deliver prepared food; it also connects customers with Asian supermarkets.

The rise of the dark kitchen has also complicated what we understand as a restaurant. Siqi Zhao started a Deliveroo business in the pandemic from her flat in Canada Water after graduating from a food anthropology master’s at SOAS. Her customers wouldn’t have known the homely meals they were ordering were literally from someone’s home kitchen. Siqi shifted her operations to a dark kitchen in Hackney, where she now specialises in vegan Chinese cooking, informed by her Buddhist faith. I visited her in the dark kitchen a few times, passing a Jamaican takeaway, a British pie maker and Indian chefs prepping huge stock-pots of dal. Siqi told me that she is impressed by how much Chinese food has evolved in London over the eight years she has been here. (I met Siqi when we were both chefs at BAO – a restaurant co-founded by Erchen Chang, a student from Taiwan.) The arrival of major mainland Chinese brands like Xi Cha (bubble tea) and Haidilao (hot pot) has pushed local businesses to raise their game in order to compete.

Martin also uses a dark kitchen for Jinli, which ensures quality control throughout his restaurants. It also allows him to reduce costly kitchen space in each branch, making room for more seating instead. But times are still tough. When Martin took the reins in 2015, the UK was the leading figure in Europe, charging ahead with bringing China, the world’s second-largest economy, to the world’s largest single market. China’s economy grew 7% that year. Now Britain is adrift in post-Brexit economic malaise and China’s property bubble has burst. Covid disrupted China’s outbound student migration, and as the economy has worsened at home, many are questioning whether the big investment in a foreign education will really pay off. The ‘halo effect’ that foreign degrees once offered returning graduates has largely worn off, according to the sociologist Ma Yingyi – so why go abroad in the first place? After peaking in 2022, Chinese student numbers are down around 3% year on year.

This has affected the operation of restaurants. When Jinli first opened, 90% of its clientele were mainland Chinese; now the figure is around 70%. And those who come? They spend less. ‘My customer wants £20 worth of food, £30 worth of service, and £40 worth of respect,’ notes Martin, laughing bitterly. ‘When the economy is bad, people become bad,’ he adds. His customers are also harsher with their criticism as they’re more price sensitive. ‘I used to be asked to take the service charge off once a week at most,’ he told me, ‘now it happens two or three times a day.’

But there’s a bigger trend that Martin will have to confront. One of the ironic consequences of Brexit has been the fact that net migration to the UK hasn’t dropped – it’s just shifted. As of the 2022/23 academic year, there were 53,790 Nigerian students enrolled in UK universities (in the most recent academic year, due to the economic crisis in Nigeria, this number has now halved). This is a significant jump from 2020/21 – the previous record enrolment, with 13,830 students. In 2022, Indian students overtook Chinese as the largest foreign-born student population in the UK.

As Martin and I chatted, I wondered if, in a few years, we would be talking instead about the proliferation of South Indian dosa shops and Nigerian suya spots around the country. I thought about what the restaurateurs of the future, following in the wake of the next waves of migration, would be fretting about. Martin was unfazed. ‘I want to build an international brand,’ he said. Maybe in a few years he’ll be in Dubai.

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Credits

Barclay Bram is a writer based in London. He is currently a producer In The Economist’s podcast department. You can find more of his work on his website.

Chan Yang Kim (김 찬양) is a Korean-born, Manchester-raised artist. His work has been showcased in the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, as well as on platforms such as the British Journal of Photography, Vice and AnOther Magazine.

The Vittles Chinatown Project is guest-edited by Angela Hui.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Chinatowns have always been a part of my life in one way or another. When my parents emigrated from Hong Kong and China to the UK in the 1980s, they bounced between Chinatowns, Chinese restaurants and takeaways, going wherever the work took them. They usually lived above the businesses or in staff accommodation until they saved enough to buy their own Chinese takeaway in South Wales. Back then, the selection of Asian ingredients was pretty limited, and so hubs for Chinese culture were vital. Our idea of a family holiday was a three-hour drive every few months to Birmingham’s Wing Yip, after which we’d then spend time in the Chinatown there.

Whenever I visit a new city, I now automatically make a beeline for Chinatown to familiarise myself with new surroundings. Whether official or unofficial, these neighbourhoods were historically shaped by those who were marginalised – outcasts finding community in spaces often deemed undesirable. Liverpool’s Chinatown, the first in Europe, was established in the 1850s, built by Chinese sailors who settled and never left. They faced language barriers, xenophobia, economic struggles and even secret deportations, but many held on and made a life for themselves. Since moving from a stigmatised East End Limehouse area due to war damage, slum clearance, and post-war anti-immigrant prejudice, London’s Chinatown thrived in Soho during the 1960s and 1970s, becoming an official part of the city in 1985. Across the UK, Chinatowns became places for opportunity, discovery, and reinvention. They served as third spaces for Chinese immigrants, the diaspora and transnational communities, as well as for anyone else looking for a sense of belonging, community or connection (and, of course, a damn good meal).

Yet, for all their success, Chinatowns are dying – or, at least, my versions of them are. Some, like Liverpool, have been in decline since the pandemic; others, like London’s, have lost their unique Cantonese character and have developed a pan-Asian aesthetic curated for TikTok, while its restaurants face modern economic marginalisation through high-rent displacement. At the same time, as Chinese culture spreads across the UK, many cities and university towns – Sheffield, Coventry, Nottingham, Bristol, Southampton, Exeter – now have strong restaurant scenes fuelled by the increase in Chinese students, some of which can arguably be called new ‘unofficial’ Chinatowns. New developments, fuelled by property investment, student housing and available space, are also creating rival Chinatowns in new areas and suburbs. Everything about these spaces is contested – who they’re for, their relationship to Chineseness, even whether they can be called Chinatowns at all – but there is one common thread: the food.

So, for The Vittles Chinatowns Project, we have decided to examine Chinatowns across the UK and how they’re changing, while recommending some of the best places in the country to eat. Each Chinatown serves a different purpose and is aimed at a different community of people. In our lead essay, Xiao Ma, researcher, co-director of Chinatown Collective and former Cultural Projects Manager at China Exchange, asks ‘Who is Chinatown for?’, exploring the relationship between different Chinese communities and the London Chinatown, and questioning if there’s still a real sense of community left. In ‘The New Chinatowns’, Barclay Bram looks at how Chinese international students – who have long been the UK’s biggest student diaspora – have formed new Chinatowns across the length and breadth of the UK, and how a simple change in university policy has fundamentally altered what British towns and cities look like, and how we all eat.

We also wanted to celebrate the cultural significance of Asian supermarkets, and the love, nostalgia or grief they can stir up, so in ‘Crying in Wing Yip’ we asked eight of our favourite chefs, restaurateurs and writers to reflect on how they allow East and South East Asian people to connect to their heritage – or even just the thrill of discovering different products you’d never find in a Tesco or Sainsbury’s. Ultimately, this compilation is a love letter to Asian supermarkets, the products that define them and the people who work there. Think of it as a semi-functional guide, one that captures their emotional pull while offering practical tips on where to shop and what to buy.

And finally, of course, we’re offering multiple restaurant guides for Chinatowns old and new across the UK. In our huge Guide to London’s Chinatowns – longer even than the Wong Kei menu – we have made the case that there are now six areas of Chinese commerce that could be called Chinatowns: Soho, Queensway, the Docklands, Bloomsbury, Spitalfields and Hendon–Colindale. To prove this, we have listed every great restaurant encompassing a range of regional cuisines that you can find in these neighbourhoods, and tell you what to order at each one. Elsewhere, we have provided guides to the historic British Chinatowns in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as to new Chinatowns in Cambridge and Glasgow, with recommendations also for Oxford, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle and Edinburgh, written by people who know these cities inside and out. We hope you use these guides enthusiastically – and so we have made a huge subscriber-only map (linked to at the end of this post) including every restaurant mentioned to enable you to do so.

This Chinatown project has been years in the making and it would not have been possible without the incredible contributions and efforts of everyone listed below. Every time I walk through Chinatowns, any Chinatown, I am reminded that their resilience has been built brick by brick, story by story, over generations. If we do not keep telling their stories, even as those stories change, they might not be here tomorrow. Angela Hui

Contributors

Angela Hui, Xiao Ma, Barclay Bram, Ken Hom, Songsoo Kim, Sabrina Fung, Will Harris, Huong Black, Katie Goh, Hannah Natalie Hosanee, Erchen Chang, Chan Yang Kim (김찬양), Lap-fai Lee, Lisa Tse, Helen Tse, Emily Beswick, Hai Lin Leung, Sufea Mohamad Noor, Beatrice Png, Ruth Cheung-Judge, Jonathan Nunn, Elaine Zhao, Siqi Chong, Guan Chua, Zoe Suen, Fuchsia Dunlop, Barclay Bram, Dan Biddulph, Isaac Rangaswami, Montague Ashley-Craig, Anto Wu, Food in London, Liz Tray, Edward Moon-Little, Cici Peng, Harin Turrel, Leah Pattem, Eva Kossman, Meg Houghton-Gilmour, Sean Wai Keung, Steven Young, Kerre Chen and Kenn Lam.

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Who is Chinatown for?

Xiao Ma unpacks the layers of London’s Chinatown. Illustration by Kenn Lam

Many visitors to London’s Chinatown speak of the place confidently, as if it were a standardised product – predictable and ready-made, like a familiar menu item. But the view that Chinatowns are timeless spaces with a homogeneous identity has been shaped by over a century of racialised and romanticised portrayals in media and literature, as well as modern urban branding that markets Chinatown as a cultural product. The social production of Chinatown is partly shaped by the racialised construction of Chineseness in the UK – and, in turn, an established Chinatown informs the dominant imaginaries of Chineseness in Britain.

The New Chinatowns

How the massive influx in recent years of Chinese international students has produced new Chinatowns across the UK. Words by Barclay Bram. Photographs by Chan Yang Kim.

The impact that the mass migration of Chinese students has had on UK food culture should be obvious to anyone who has seen HungryPanda delivery drivers zip through red lights, who has marvelled at the diversity and number of bubble tea stores, or who has noticed the upscaling of Asian supermarkets in recent years … This mass migration has allowed regional Chinese cooking to proliferate outside of London, particularly in small university towns. But it has also done something else – it has exploded the very concept of Chinatown. With university towns around the UK catering to this influx of new money and seeing their high streets thrive, it begs an important question: who needs a Chinatown?

Crying in Wing Yip

Writers and cooks share memories of their favourite Asian shops and supermarkets across the UK. Photographs by Michäel Protin.

The newer Asian supermarkets – the ones with in-store noodle pit stops and friends-only WeChat groups for exclusive deals – are great, but for many people, stepping into older stores like Wing Yip feels like something more than a shopping trip. You can easily lose hours of your life amid the narrow aisles pulsing with Aaron Kwok’s Cantopop hits, fighting Asian aunties over the freshest bunches of morning glory or marvelling at the live fish tanks as if in an aquarium. These stores have been there for us when we need them, providing a tangible link to our past as well as an education about new ingredients that can rekindle connections to our cultural roots.

The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns

Our first-ever guide to include all six (and counting) of London’s Chinatowns, old and new, featuring more than eighty restaurants and fifteen distinct cuisines

The Soho Chinatown – the place that most Londoners would think of when they hear the word ‘Chinatown’ – is no longer the only centre of Chinese culture in the city. New types of Chinatowns are flourishing across the city, in places where Chinese people actually live. To the historical Chinatowns of Soho and Queensway, you can add the conurbations from Bloomsbury to Kings Cross, and from Spitalfields to Aldgate, that have been utterly transformed by the university and housing market, catering to a new demographic of students. In Colindale and Hendon you will find a satellite Chinatown catering to second-generation Cantonese families and new arrivals from Hong Kong on BNO passports. And in the Docklands, on the site of the first Chinatown, you will find a sprawling, unplanned ecosystem of gigantic dimsum parlours and regional Chinese restaurants, making use of the area’s unique topography.

The Vittles Guide to Liverpool’s Chinatown

Where to eat in Europe’s oldest Chinatown

Liverpool’s Chinatown, near the docks, has served the Chinese seafarers (as well as those from the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) who have passed through and settled in the city since the 1880s … The installation of Chinatown’s enormous arch in 2000, a gift from Liverpool’s twin city, Shanghai, heralded a new era of international students from mainland China to the city. Mini-Chinatowns sprung up to supply these contemporary sojourners, including Myrtle Street’s row of grocery shops and cafes and a cluster of hot pot restaurants on London Road … Maybe Liverpool’s Chinatown hints at the future of Chinatowns in the UK: a mix of old-school dim sum parlours, flourishing takeaways and new Malaysian and Vietnamese spots, unconfined to a single street.

The Vittles Guide to Manchester’s Chinatown

Lisa and Helen Tse share their pick of places to eat in Manchester’s compact but rich Chinatown

Manchester’s Chinatown is compact – just half a square mile bounded by Moseley, Charlotte, Princess and Portland Streets, with the grand Imperial Chinese arch at its heart, a gift from China and a reminder of the old Sino-British textile trade that built this city. The food has shifted over the years: what was once solidly Cantonese now runs hot with Sichuan peppercorns and the vinegary punch of northern noodle joints … This is not a Chinatown that performs for tourists. It just cooks, day after day, better than it has any right to. If you come hungry, you’ll eat things you’ve never heard of, cooked by people who’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, and it will absolutely ruin you for anywhere else.

The Vittles Guide to Birmingham’s Chinatown

Lap-fai Lee recommends his favourite spots in Birmingham, a mixture of classic Cantonese spots and more recent regional specialists

Birmingham’s Chinatown is not a tourist destination like the London equivalent. It is a living Chinatown; our businesses primarily cater to the local Chinese community … When Chinese students arrived in the 2000s to study at Birmingham’s three universities, mainland Chinese flavours arrived with them … With the recent influx of Hong Kong immigrants, the pendulum has swung back … Yet despite the changes, Chinatown continues to reflect the Birmingham spirit; it’s quiet and industrious, always self-deprecating. We’re confident in who we are and what we have to offer. All you have to do is come with an open mind.

The Vittles Guide to Chinese Restaurants in Cambridge

Cambridge offers a broad range of regional Chinese cuisines. Cici Peng, Edward Moon Little and Siqi Chong share their favourite spots

While Cambridge’s Chinese migration history parallels London’s in some ways, its food scene has largely sidestepped the recent patterns that have swept through the capital’s dining scene: there are barely any Sichuan concepts or biang biang noodle joints … Instead, Cambridge offers peripheral regional cuisines that, in some cases, arrived here before reaching London … With no centralised Chinatown, the city’s Chinese restaurants can instead be found in dispersed culinary pockets – in residential neighbourhoods, bubbled together along the peripheries of the local shopping centre or along the bustling Mill Road.

The Vittles Guide to Chinese Restaurants in Glasgow

Sean Wai Keung’s guide to Glasgow’s best Chinese restaurants (and one bakery)

The Glasgow Chinatown complex opened its doors in 1992. It featured 15 indoor units, a large restaurant and a traditional gate. It was in the Cowcaddens area to the north of the city, and was both a means of promoting Chinese businesses to those outside the community and a home for organisation and solidarity, working with other organisations such as Wing Hong Elderly Group to provide information on issues like housing and visas. Unfortunately the complex itself has been in steady decline over the last decade … Despite this, Cowcaddens itself is still a major hub for Chinese businesses in the city, while over in the West End a new kind of ‘Chinatown’ is blossoming, with its restaurants catering more towards the growing Chinese student population at Glasgow University.

The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns

The Vittles guide to historic and new Chinatowns, with more than 150 Chinese-restaurant recommendations across the UK

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Good morning, and welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this essay, Xiao Ma explores how London’s Chinatown has evolved over the years and its continued resonance and importance for various communities despite rebranding, gentrification and commodification.

You can read the rest of the project here:

The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

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I first stumbled into London’s Chinatown by accident when I moved to the UK twelve years ago. As someone who grew up in north-west China, I remember feeling out of place beneath the red lanterns, surrounded by signs that seemed frozen in time and the scent of roast duck. But within a few years, Chinatown would become my workplace: in 2018, I began leading walking tours that shared the area’s hidden histories with visitors as part of Chinatown heritage projects led by China Exchange.

On these walks, I always ask people what comes to mind when they hear the word ‘Chinatown’ and generally get some variation on ‘a place dedicated to/celebrating Chinese culture’ as a response. One day, I tried a thought experiment with a school group from Wales: I asked them what a ‘Wales Town’ in Japan would involve.

‘The Welsh dragon’, ‘Welsh cakes’, ‘Daffodils’, ‘Our flag’ came the shouted responses.

But when I asked if any of these things represented them as people, they said no. ‘So, should we conflate Chinatown with Chinese people and culture?’ I asked.

Many visitors to London’s Chinatown speak of the place confidently, as if it were a standardised product – predictable and ready-made, like a familiar menu item. But the view that Chinatowns are timeless spaces with a homogeneous identity has been shaped by over a century of racialised and romanticised portrayals in media and literature, as well as modern urban branding that markets Chinatown as a cultural product. The social production of Chinatown is partly shaped by the racialised construction of Chineseness in the UK – and, in turn, an established Chinatown informs the dominant imaginaries of Chineseness in Britain. That’s why I hesitate when any urban space with traces of Chinese presence is labelled a Chinatown. The name carries history and weight.

The functions and meanings of Chinatown for London’s Chinese diaspora have continually evolved. For many post-war migrants who arrived before the 1980s from former British colonies – like my in-laws – Chinatown was the first point of connection. It offered work through local community networks, food and groceries from home, and even cinemas screening Cantonese films. That era has passed. Chinese restaurants and supermarkets have long since proliferated across London, meaning that trips to Central are no longer a necessity, while family-run Cantonese restaurants have slowly given way to bubble tea joints and trendy regional spots serving Sichuanese or Xi’an food.

At the same time, Chinatown has never belonged only to Chinese Londoners; it has always been shaped by London and the people within it. That influence has grown massively in recent years, and the area has become an increasingly popular tourist attraction – the TikTok Chinatown. Like any place, Chinatown doesn’t hold a fixed identity. Multiple Chinatowns exist at once, layered with overlapping or conflicting histories and stories. For many of the second-generation British-Chinese people I’ve spoken to, Chinatown is both a time capsule and a shifting tide – people return to make new memories or revisit old ones. Still, the same questions arise: Who was Chinatown for? Who is it for now? And who will it be for next?

The story of London’s Chinatown is part of the ongoing story of Soho. In her book Nights Out, Judith Walkowitz describes how late-nineteenth-century Soho shifted from ‘a dingy, foreign, proletarian quarter into a commodified centre of cultural tourism’. Gerrard Street in particular served as a home for newcomers, a refuge for the displaced and a stage for reinvention and dissent. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Gerrard Street and its surrounding area grew into a business hub for working-class Cantonese- and Hakka-speaking migrants, most of whom came from Hong Kong’s New Territories and were drawn by the area’s low commercial rents.

According to the 2019 oral history project and exhibition The Making of Chinatown, by the late 1970s, around forty Chinese businesses were thriving on Gerrard, Wardour and Lisle Streets and in the surrounding area (not only restaurants, but also cinemas, bookshops and travel agencies), serving both Chinese and non-Chinese Londoners. Soho has long had a diverse, evolving population, but racism was still commonplace. In the same oral history project, many Chinese restaurateurs described being treated as ‘second-class citizens’.

As part of my PhD, which is about Chinatown-related heritage-making practices, I have spoken to dozens of Londoners – both people who identify as Chinese (including migrants and UK-born individuals of Chinese heritage, adoptees, people of mixed heritage and international students) and people with other heritage (such as Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Thai, Italian, Irish and English) – about their memories and lived experiences of Chinatown. These Londoners told me that Chinatown speaks to different aspects of their identities, such as being ‘migrant’, ‘minority’, ‘queer’, ‘Londoner’, ‘British’ and ‘(British) Chinese’.

For some of my Chinese interviewees, Chinatown is a symbol of endurance and pride. One interview was with Wai-Lin, who moved with her family from her village in Hong Kong in 1973, when she was four years old. Like many migrants from Hong Kong, her parents worked in London’s growing Chinese catering trade, and her father, a self-taught chef, worked at Canton in Chinatown in the 1980s. Wai-Lin didn’t live in Chinatown, but grew up there. After school, she knew to head straight to her father’s restaurant, weaving through the bustle before finding her father and sitting down to eat char siu rice with him. ‘Now that I think about it … Perhaps Dad just wanted to spend more time with me,’ she says softly.

As I walked the streets of Chinatown with Wai-Lin, stopping at the places her parents and siblings used to work (they roasted ducks, shaped pastries by hand and poured tea for regulars at beloved spots like Young’s and Poon’s and Co), it felt like tracing an old family photo. Chinatown is Wai-Lin’s childhood, even though its material traces have mostly vanished.

At that time, many migrants from the New Territories referred to the district simply as ‘Soho’ in English or ‘wong sing [皇城]’ (royal city) in Cantonese, because of its proximity to Buckingham Palace. The term ‘Chinatown’ gained popularity among Chinese people in the 1980s, especially after the area was officially designated as such in 1985 – a result of a collaboration between Westminster City Council and the London Chinatown Chinese Association (LCCA), which was mainly aimed at attracting tourists.

In an interview as part of the London Chinatown Oral History Project (2011–2013), Harry (Chi Cheung) Lee, the late former president of the LCCA, claimed that he proposed the idea of creating a Chinatown to the council in 1984, when there were already Chinatowns in many other cities globally, and emphasised that it should have an ‘oriental feel’. The Chinatown transformation project involved exoticisation and self-exoticisation, meeting non-Chinese visitors’ expectations of ‘Chineseness’.

Westminster City Council allocated around £235,000 for the Chinatown ‘facelift’ project according to a local news report (see image). The project included building three archways, installing a selection of street furniture and bilingual street signs, and pedestrianising the main streets. In 1986, Peter Levy (son of Joe Levy, a key figure in London’s 1960s property boom) and Jonathan Lane made their first property purchase in Chinatown, laying the foundations for the company that would become known as Shaftesbury Capital (which, as of late 2022, owns around 80% of the area, including forty-three shops and ninety-eight food and drink businesses).

For some of my Chinese interviewees, Chinatown is a racialised label imposed on them that they would rather reject. Others, including Priscilla, talked about reclaiming it as a space that reflects the in-betweenness of their diasporic lives. When Priscilla’s parents moved from Malaysia and Hong Kong to London in the 1980s, they embraced Soho’s nightlife; her arrival later transformed how they related to and consumed Chinatown. At six, Priscilla was enrolled in the UK Chinese Chamber of Commerce Chinese School. She hated the classes, but loved the weekly drive into central London and the family meals that followed.

Lately, Priscilla has been thinking more about what it means to perform Chineseness in Britain. ‘We were born to be Chinese, but in a London, British context,’ she says. ‘How much of my culture and my heritage was performed? And how much of it is what I’ve read through the eyes of Western people – especially walking through Chinatown that’s told back to me from a Western point of view?’ As we stand underneath the Chinese archway on Macclesfield Street – one of Chinatown’s most photographed landmarks – we both feel a mix of familiarity and alienness. Few people know that the three archways were designed not by Chinese architects, but by Richard Swain of Westminster City Council in the 1980s. In a 1984 interview with AJ (available at the Westminster Archives), Swain explained he based the gate design on ‘research at the V&A into authentic Chinese design’.

‘The difference between cultures becomes what defines it in the eyes of the majority,’ Priscilla says. ‘And those differences become the bank of reference representing Chinese culture.’ This is not to say that Chinatown isn’t authentic. For Priscilla, its authenticity lies in lived experience: the memories, emotions and personal connections people have to streets and shopfronts, things that exist beyond the socially constructed borders of an ethnic or racial category.

Chinatowns in white-majority societies have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves, often born out of exclusion. London’s first Chinatown in Limehouse, for instance, served as a refuge for Chinese sailors who faced overt racism. Today, newly developed or redeveloped Chinatowns in Europe, North America and Australia are often branded as ‘multicultural assets’ for urban regeneration and tourism.

In 2018, Shaftesbury began using the term ‘pan-Asian’ to describe their approach in Chinatown. Several Chinese business owners I interviewed were wary of the label, arguing that it flattens the rich differences between cultures. As Jenny Lau, author of An A–Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included), put it: ‘You would never talk about pan-European or pan-American food with the same glibness.’

More recently, phrases like ‘authentic ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] experience’ have popped up on Chinatown’s social media, which is funded by Shaftesbury Capital. The use of ‘ESEA’ feels disconnected from the anti-racism political mobilisation among ESEA people, which has fuelled a fast-growing ESEA political identity. It also sits uneasily with the lived reality of many Chinatown workers, who are often first-generation migrants in marginalised socioeconomic positions and who rarely identify with the term ‘ESEA’, even though most can trace their heritage to those regions.

Chinatown holds many meanings and conflicting interests. It is often framed or imagined as a ‘celebration of difference’, but that ‘feel-good’ narrative can obscure as much as it reveals. When we talk about Chinatown in the context of racial justice, we also need to recognise the complex relationship between the business interests of those who own and run businesses there and the social and political needs of those in ESEA diasporas who seek racial equality. These agendas sometimes overlap and intersect, but sometimes they don’t.

China Exchange, the organisation I used to work for, closed in 2024 due to financial difficulties. I’m still grieving. Working there taught me things about myself and the intergenerational traumas I carry. It was a place of connection, where people from all walks of life shared complex, layered stories rooted in the neighbourhood. A place to sit with memories, to make sense of the past. That work needs to continue. It’s why I now volunteer with the newly established Chinatown Collective, where the legacy of China Exchange’s heritage and community work lives on. Alongside other History Champions, I lead walks through the streets and eat in historic restaurants such as Lido, talking through the migrations, labour and food that have both shaped and been shaped by the neighbourhood. We sit with the anger and grief of historical wrongs; we taste the resilience and creativity of the people of Chinatown.

London’s Chinatown is a place of everyday heritage, complex and contested, shaped by those who passed through it and those who are still here. As Bernard P Wong and Chee-Beng Tan’s Chinatowns Around the World shows, Chinatowns take many forms, shaped by their histories, land use, inter-ethnic relations, and local and global changes. They are deeply embedded in their own geographic, political, social and economic contexts. Here, in the former capital of the British Empire, Chinatown’s story remains unfinished. It is part of the longer, ongoing story of London itself.

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Credits

Xiao Ma is a heritage practitioner and researcher with a focus on migration. You can learn more about her work here.

Kenn Lam is an illustrator and visual artist whose inspirations range from classical Japanese Ukiyo-e art to traditional Chinese medicine labels and Victorian headstones. You can find his work on his website or his Instagram.

The Chinatown Collective is dedicated to heritage-making and community-building in London’s Chinatown. It is currently organising ‘Looking Back to Look Forward: 40 Years of Chinatown in Central London’ – a year-long festival inviting everyone to reflect on Chinatown’s layered past and imagine its future. For more information, visit chinatowncollective.london.

The Vittles Chinatowns project is guest-edited by Angela Hui.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Welcome back to the Vittles Chinatowns Project! In today’s newsletter, Crying in Wing Yip, we have asked eight of our favourite chefs, restaurateurs and writers to reflect on the significance of Asian supermarkets, and how they allow East and South East Asian people to connect to their heritage.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

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In the ever-evolving landscape of British grocery culture over the last decade, Asian supermarkets have undergone a remarkable transformation. Previously, supermarkets like SeeWoo and Wing Yip were anchored in ethnically diverse suburbs and Chinatowns. Their modest storefronts hid their true importance: in addition to being lifelines for families seeking a taste of home, they also propped up the entire immigrant-owned hospitality trade, providing the essential and hard-to-find ingredients which are needed to cook and survive.

​​Today, Asian convenience stores and supermarkets have reshaped British eating habits. From family-run mom-and-pop corner shops to sleek chain establishments like H Mart and Oseyo, Asian grocery shops have transcended niche status to become a nationwide cultural phenomenon. Even major UK supermarkets have caught on: their outdated ‘oriental’ aisles, once full of novelty items, now stock products that have infiltrated nearly every kitchen in the country.

The newer Asian supermarkets – the ones with in-store noodle pit stops and friends-only WeChat groups for exclusive deals – are great, but for many people, myself included, stepping into older stores like Wing Yip feels like something more than a shopping trip. You can easily lose hours of your life amid the narrow aisles pulsing with Aaron Kwok’s Cantopop hits, fighting Asian aunties over the freshest bunches of morning glory or marvelling at the live fish tanks as if in an aquarium.

These stores have been there for us when we need them, providing a tangible link to our past as well as an education about new ingredients that can rekindle connections to our cultural roots. They’re sanctuaries for people who don’t quite feel like they belong, or for those who want to top up their Asianness. This compilation celebrates supermarkets and shops around the UK that have fostered the country’s East and South-East Asian communities. Accessible, affordable, warm and welcoming, they also now come with the latest stupid Buldak ramen flavour as seen on TikTok. Angela Hui

Asia Supermarket, Belfast

Katie Goh, writer and author

When I was a kid living on the outskirts of Belfast, our day trips into the city usually ended with a stop on the Ormeau Road, at a warehouse called Asia Supermarket. Asia Supermarket was the only large-scale Asian supermarket in Belfast – and in Northern Ireland – when I was growing up. For three decades, it was the only place Chinese restaurateurs and immigrants went to get ingredients and do their shopping. It was like a portal out of the North, which back then was 99% white. In the warehouse, I was surrounded by Asians. Back outside, it was as if they had disappeared.

Sometimes my brothers and I would stay in the car, shouting ‘Pocky! Pocky!’ at my dad as he went in to pick up our essentials: rice, sauce packets and vegetables that weren’t yet available in Tesco. Other times, we would join him in the dimly lit warehouse to make sure he chose the right flavour of Nissin noodles. One day, as I was helping to carry boxes of food in from the car, I tripped over on our driveway and got a gnarly cut on my left knee. The little gravel stones buried their way under my skin. Two decades on, I still have the scar.

In 2018, Asia Supermarket moved to a shiny, multi-storey building – a relocation that cost millions, according to the Belfast Telegraph. I visited it recently when I was back home. It is a world away from the warehouse of my childhood. The new Asia Supermarket is large, brightly lit and filled with Chinese, Korean, Thai and Malaysian food. At the top of the building is an excellent cafe serving rice and curry as well as salads and sandwiches. The clientele has also changed dramatically: when I was there, I saw as many white people as Asian.

Asia Supermarket’s glow-up has made it more popular with, and perhaps more palatable to, white locals. I like the new building, and good on the owners for their success, but I remain nostalgic for the dimly lit warehouse that inadvertently gave me my scar.

Lo’s Noodle Factory, London

Songsoo Kim, chef, food writer and head of sourcing and development at the Super8 restaurant group

I remember the first time I was taken to Lo’s Noodles. It was with Rita – a boisterous, no-nonsense Taiwanese friend with a sharp eye for good turnip cakes. At Lo’s, I instantly felt whole. I picked up some turnip cakes and some dried-shrimp-and-chive cheung fun, and stocked them in my fridge for a time I needed solace.

That was seven years ago, when a fresh bag of ho fun cost £2. The price has almost doubled since, but it still feels affordable. Even when I don’t buy anything, I walk past Lo’s just to look in, to make sure it’s still going. Rice, water, craft, steam. Each hand reaching for the noodles or cheung fun feels like a small vote for its survival. The more people I see queuing, picking up noodles, the luckier I feel.

Meanwhile, the soft pull of ho fun and the warmth of cheung fun at midnight have become my own quiet grammar of care. Rice, water and steam: these elements probably make up the door to my soul, with cheung fun forming the doorway curtain. For sure, this is the comfort that connects us all.

I did visit Lo’s once to ask if they could make sen yai – Thailand’s counterpart to ho fun, made with a little more tapioca starch – for a dish at Smoking Goat. I was met with a hard pass. The amount I requested was too small to justify changing the recipe or trying something new. How naive of me.

Hang Won Hong, Manchester

Hannah-Natalie Hosanee, co-founder of Little Yellow Rice Co

Dear Hang Won Hong,

Walking your aisles always feels different to my usual weekly shop. Stepping inside your shop feels like visiting a friend’s home, comforting and inviting. It has become a ritual: and never feels like a quick errand. I often come without a shopping list, looking for inspiration. I move slowly through the aisles, fluorescent lights bouncing off shelves packed with jars, sauces, vegetables and noodles. You’re busy and a little chaotic, which takes me straight back to childhood memories in Malaysia.

The way you’re organised by region matters when you cook the way I do. I can walk straight in, head for the Malaysian section and know I’ll find exactly what I need. When a dish depends on a specific paste, sauce and seasoning, that clarity makes all the difference. You easily have the best Malaysian selection in Manchester.

Your instant noodle selection never disappoints, and neither do the drinks, from OldTown white coffee to instant milk teas and make-your-own boba kits. Then there are the snacks: crisps, chocolates and chewy sweets galore, those everyday joys I’d forgotten I missed. Most importantly, thank you for always having the Malaysian Maggi garlic chilli sauce I can’t live without.

You’re more than a supermarket. You reconnect me to my roots and make Manchester feel a little more like home, no matter how far I am from my family.

With love and appreciation,
Hannah-Natalie Hosanee

New Discoveries in London

Ken Hom, CBE, chef and cookbook author

I always love exploring the food shops in London’s Chinatown, especially the larger ones like SeeWoo or Loon Fung. As an old codger who has been cooking for over sixty years, I still discover new things about the richness of Asia’s food culture in these fantastic places. My go-to items are, first, Chinese sausages – sweet and savoury, made with pork meat and pork fat (or duck liver and fat), marinated in spices and hung on strings to dry; steamed with rice, they are irresistible. The Chinese bacon is just as good, and as a chilli lover, I always experiment with new types of chilli sauce. Although I live part of the time in Bangkok and travel often to Tokyo and Hong Kong, I never fail to discover something new in London. Each time I visit the Chinatown shops, I have to drag myself away because I cannot stop buying things!

Anonymously Collated Late-Nineties Memories, London

Will Harris, author and writer

After church – that’s right – I would drive into town – forty minutes or more, depending on the traffic. Dad had char siu crispy noodles; it was his treat. We were looking forward to things! No, I didn’t think the world would end. I used to hate driving, didn’t like it at all. I hated it when you’d roll a cigarette and steer with your elbows. Soup noodles for me. We had a dial-up modem, a big desktop called a Tiny. Why was it called that? What could you do on it? We drank SunnyD for breakfast. You wanted to buy labu. Cut it up into slices and chuck it in the pan, and it turns sweet. I had a pair of paper sunglasses for watching the solar eclipse that came free with a magazine. I listened to ‘Can’t Stop’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was an eclipse? Yes, I was just saying. I preferred New Loon Moon to Loon Fung; they had better things there. You mean they had more South-East Asian things? But it was cloudy. Waste of time. I waited at the back in the cold section. Ran my hand over the bumpy strips of vacuum-sealed tempeh and pretended it was my brain. Oh, and I’d get a coconut bun for tea. You remember that? They dropped the coins down a wooden slit, or was that at Kowloon Bakery? The light went out and the temperature fell. You were plugged into the whole world. I was asleep.

Labu doesn’t look like how it tastes. You think it’ll taste like bitter melon. Everyone had MSN Messenger then. I was in the car and suddenly it was night. I can’t picture it; I must have been asleep. We had labu and eggs for dinner.

Day In, Birmingham

Sabrina Fung, owner of Blow Water Cafe in Birmingham

When it comes to buying ingredients, I always head to Day In Supermarket. It’s been a fixture in Birmingham’s Chinatown for me ever since I arrived as a student. Now I run a restaurant here, my weekly shop still happens at Day In; in terms of style, layout and what’s on the shelves, it’s the closest shop in the city to the shops back home in Hong Kong. The staff know me so well that when they pick up the phone they greet me in Cantonese: ‘Good morning, Sabrina, how can I help?’ They must have my number saved. Kate, who often answers, sometimes glances at what I’m buying, and we end up chatting about recipes. It’s like filling a little hole of homesickness every time.

The Basement in SeeWoo, London

Erchen Chang, co-founder and creative director of BAO

I’ve always been obsessed with hidden undergrounds, the thrill of discovering a tucked-away world. When I was at the Slade, Hanna Supermarket on Store Street in Bloomsbury had a restaurant in its basement, in which I found shelves of old VHS tapes with handwritten Korean labels. My friends and I guessed that it was some kind of kinky, obscure Korean porn, and we’d sit there eating our bibimbaps and laughing at the idea of being surrounded by illicit materials. One day, the restaurant’s windows were smashed in. We heard a rumour that some gangsters had discovered the tapes and the owners had to flee.

This was also around the time that Shing and I had started dating. He seduced me with his cooking and his knowledge of Chinatown’s hidden corners. He came up with the idea of a dumpling crawl – a pub crawl, but for dumplings. We went from shop to shop, ordering too much because each place had a minimum order (as they should). But the thing that impressed me most that day was the basement at SeeWoo.

The entrance back then was more hidden than it is now. We’d slip downstairs, admiring the Leung Tim cleavers together, how beautifully wrapped they were, in that old-school glossy kraft crisp paper packaging. We’d imagine whose bones we’d be chopping with those cast-iron blades. There were other treasures too: giant ladles, cast-iron sizzlers and massive wok colanders, tools built for kitchens way bigger than our own.

Years passed, and we opened three restaurants near Chinatown. SeeWoo became our emergency pantry; whenever we ran out of something, that’s where we’d go, scrambling for supplies at the last minute. They’d hand-write their invoices in Chinese, which meant most of my chefs couldn’t even tell if they’d been charged correctly. But they still have the best-sized kai lan and mustard greens. They stock doubanjiang from Sichuan – the only one we’ll use – and the Pearl River Bridge ‘Premium Soy’, a flavour we can’t live without.

The shelves at the entrance shift with the seasons: dou miao only appears in the winter, and yellow chives emerge with the first spring sun. In the peak of the summer, I can never resist a box of £15 longan fruit. Sometimes I still sneak downstairs just to reacquaint myself with the crockery, in case of emergencies. The basement air is still. I can take a breath – perhaps admire a Leung Tim cleaver, romanticise, remember how I fell in love with SeeWoo in the first place – before heading back to the never-ending chaotic kitchen.

SeeWoo from Three Feet off the Ground, London

Huong Black, chef

As an eighties- and Scottish-born, Croydon-raised, Viet Hoa daughter of North Vietnamese refugees, I have had my fair share of ‘crying in SeeWoo’ moments. I have only been to Vietnam twice: for six weeks when I was fourteen, then nearly thirty years later with my children. Between these two visits, my mum died aged forty-five, and I committed the crime of becoming a chef despite my ostensible academic success.

This career change came after a major depressive episode in my late twenties. I now cook what I call ‘white people food’ – modern British cooking that, at its best, incorporates world pantry ingredients, but at its worst is a kind of semi-edible cosplay you’d never serve your own people.

Losing my mum cut me off from my wider Viet Canto (and American) family, leaving me to navigate motherhood on my own in a biracial household. I sometimes feel like an imposter carrying an empty shopping basket around Asian supermarkets, staring at shelves stacked with things I half recognise, ingredients I might have eaten once or watched my parents cook with. Eating bowl after bowl of bún riêu in Hà Nội recently made me realise I’d been overdoing mine for years: too tomatoey, too porky, or, as my husband puts it, ‘cooking with crayons’.

Although I grew up eating plenty of Viet Chinese food, not speaking or reading Chinese means I never quite know how to ask for help in Chinese shops. Still, I’m drawn to the packaging of brands that seem trapped in time: it’s why I always buy Evergreen Pickled Leeks, Foo Lung Ching Kee, Rose Brand products or Chin Chin Grass Jelly. Newer Vietnamese mixes and flours now line the shelves, but I tend to make mine from scratch because I’m old-school and we all have our crosses to bear. I was surprised, when retraining as a chef, to learn that potato starch – what culinary school calls ‘fécule’ – was used in western kitchens as a thickening agent: I only ever saw cornflour being sold in Sainsbury’s. I honestly thought potato starch was our culinary secret, one that came in white packaging with pink lettering.

Living in Zone 4, I usually drive to Wing Yip in Croydon or Duc Tien in Charlton, load up 10kg sacks of rice and wander wide aisles. I also love small Vietnamese shops, like Lai Loi on Deptford High Street, for their specificity – I’m more comfortable in my Vietnameseness there. And yet, SeeWoo still gets me. I remember it from when I was three feet off the ground, being called ‘leng mui’ (pretty girl) as my cheeks were pinched by marigold-gloved hands, my parents chatting away in Cantonese, safe to present one version of themselves. No shame. I’m trying to let go of that shame, as well. The other day, I bought Ching Po Leng herbal soup mix there, paid in English, and nothing terrible happened. I hope my kids feel that Asian supermarkets are safe spaces for them, too.

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Credits

Will Harris is a writer and the author of Brother Poem (2023), and is currently writing about social care.

Ken Hom is a chef, author and TV presenter. A leading authority on Chinese cuisine, Ken is the author of almost forty books, which have inspired millions of home cooks around the world.

Katie Goh is the author of Foreign Fruit, winner of Scotland’s 2025 National Book Award for Debut Non-Fiction and The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh.

Hannah-Natalie Hosanee is the co-founder of Little Yellow Rice Co. Hannah spent her early years growing up with her maternal family in Penang, Malaysia, before returning to the UK.

Songsoo Kim is Head of Sourcing and Development at Super8 Restaurants, working across Kiln, Smoking Goat, Mountain and Brat in London.

Huong Black is a chef.

Erchen Chang is the creative director and co-founder of, and chef at, BAO.

Sabrina Fung is the founder of Blow Water, a Hong Kong-inspired eatery and arts space.

The photos for this piece, unless stated otherwise, are by Michaël Protin. Mike’s photo of Wing Yip above is available as a print here.

The Vittles Chinatown Project is guest-edited by Angela Hui.

The Vittles masthead can be found here.

Welcome back to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. Here is our comprehensive and extensive guide to Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants across the UK.

In this list, you will find guides to Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, and Sheffield. We have published the longer guides as standalone pieces, for which you will find links in the newsletter.

At the end of this post, you’ll also find our subscriber-only map featuring all 168 restaurants that we recommend across all the guides.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various

Subscribe now

Birmingham

Lap-fai Lee

Birmingham’s Chinatown is not a tourist destination like the London equivalent. It is a living Chinatown; our businesses primarily cater to the local Chinese community. Growing up, we would go to Hor Tung for dim sum, but below the restaurant was a Chinese shop that seemed to sell everything, including copies of Hong Kong shows on VHS for rent. When the old Bull Ring was demolished, the Chinese community shifted its focus to The Arcadian, Hurst Street and Ladywell Walk, and more restaurants, Hong Kong-style bakeries, Cantonese BBQ joints and noodle shops started to open. When Chinese students arrived in the 2000s to study at Birmingham’s three universities, mainland Chinese flavours arrived with them.

With the recent influx of Hong Kong immigrants, the pendulum has swung back. The cha chaan teng diners are now in, bringing back that nostalgic colonial comfort food to dear old Blighty. With all the redevelopment in Southside – the district’s recent nomenclature – the area is now buzzing with activity and opportunity. Yet despite the changes, Chinatown continues to reflect the Birmingham spirit; it’s quiet and industrious, always self-deprecating. All you have to do is come with an open mind.

Read Lap-fai’s full guide to Birmingham’s Chinatown here.

Bristol

Meg Houghton-Gilmour

Authentic Hot Pot and Hand-Pulled Noodles Sichuan

At Authentic Hot Pot, expert hands trained in the Chengdu style of pulling noodles twist, lift and pull thick braids of dough, each one slightly off-kilter, to be quickly transported across the room and dumped into your hot pot. It’s the only place in Bristol where the noodles are hand-pulled – which can be a rarity even in the UK’s bigger Chinatowns – and the result is an irresistible signature chew. Paired with the addictive tingle of Sichuan peppercorns, it’s a masterpiece of mouthfeel. A meal here is an all-you-can-eat, choose-your-own-adventure-affair; you can populate your hot pot with anything from slices of spam to wobbling, collagen-rich pig’s trotters. The setting is conference-room chic, brightly lit and lined with help-yourself drinks fridges. The website doesn’t work and attempting to book often proves futile, but it’s large and relatively undiscovered, so persistence is rewarded.

Thomas Lane, Redcliffe, BS1 6JG

Nice Spice Cantonese/siu mei

Neatly tucked behind Bristol Hippodrome, Nice Spice is not particularly spicy, but there’s a queue outside every day, loyal disciples of Bristol’s most succulent Cantonese roast meats waiting for their generous fix of shattering pork skin, as they have been doing for more than a decade. Inside, cleavers quarter bronzed ducks that have been hanging in the window, as hungry Chinese students and lunchtime crowds watch on from a handful of small, undecorated tables. Nice Spice does offer other dishes, but a trip here is really always about these superlative, affordable, consistently perfect roast meats. Come hungry and bring cash.

24 Denmark St, BS1 5DQ

Wangs Miscellaneous

Squeeze past tables buckling under the weight of Sichuan margaritas and plates of soy-braised chicken and you’ll see Emily Xin Xin Chan, Wangs’ head chef, tucked in the tiny kitchen, deep in concentration, pumping out inventive dishes. Owners Sandy and Sacha met in Hong Kong queuing for street food, then returned to Bristol to turn a former fruit and veg shop into their dream restaurant. They lured Chan, who grew up in her parents’ takeaway, back to Chinese cooking after a spell in fine dining, with the promise of doing things differently. The menu reads as a mission to redefine regional Chinese food in the UK, complete with house-made XO sauce, Xinjiang lamb cooked over fire and an unbeatable pan-fried turnip cake. A recent, successful crowdfunding campaign paid for a traditional Cantonese charcoal roasting oven from China, so watch this space as they expand the garden terrace and menu.

66 Bath Buildings, Montpelier, BS6 5PU

Cambridge

CP – Cici Peng. EML – Edward Moon Little. SQ – Siqi Chong.

According to the 2021 Census, Cambridgeshire has the highest proportional population of ethnic Chinese residents in the UK. While Cambridge’s Chinese migration history parallels London’s in some ways, its food scene has largely sidestepped the recent patterns that have swept through the capital’s dining scene: there are barely any Sichuan concepts or biang biang noodle joints, and new restaurant openings are rare due to a high concentration of university-owned buildings, expensive commercial rents and students opting for the sanctuary of college dining halls. Instead, Cambridge offers peripheral regional cuisines that, in some cases, arrived here before reaching London, and I maintain that the best xiao long baos in the UK can be found in the city.

With no centralised Chinatown, the city’s Chinese restaurants can instead be found in dispersed culinary pockets – in residential neighbourhoods, bubbled together along the peripheries of the local shopping centre or along the bustling Mill Road, which houses most of the city’s best independent food shops. CP

Read the Vittles Guide to Chinese Restaurants in Cambridge here.

Edinburgh

SY – Steven Young. SK – Sean Wai Keung.

Noodles Home Lanzhou

Often, the status of ‘favourite restaurant’ conveys something quite specific: reliability, the comfort taken in knowing exactly what you’re going to order and what you’re going to get. Noodles Home, which specialises in Lanzhou and Sichuanese noodles, is not that. Its gift is being consistent in its inconsistency: that the same dish at different times, or even ordered by multiple people on the same occasion, will take wildly different forms. Take my go-to, the Chongqing spicy noodles with pork mince. You can go 20 times (and, categorically, I have) and never know the broth-to-noodle ratio, the spice level, or how your choice of protein will be prepared and presented. But never being the same twice, often not even close, just means the kitchen has found multiple paths to paradise. SY

14a Nicolson St, EH8 9DH

Five Dumplings Dongbei/jiaozi

The loss of Silver Bowl, Edinburgh’s longest standing Chinese takeaway, was a blow to the city’s cultural heritage and a tough act to follow. Enter Five Dumplings. The dishes that give the new occupier of 311 Leith Walk its name are solid, but the treasure on the menu is buried elsewhere. Take its potato and aubergine mixed with peppers: an unexciting moniker for di san xian (three heavenly treasures), a Dongbei dish that harmonises the sweet, salty, sour and pungent at once. Those wanting something similarly well balanced, but with more umami and heat, should go for the dry wok beef tripe with chilli. It’s a take on offal so well judged that it finally put the haunting memories of my grandpa’s take (unseasoned, boiled for an hour by a tetchy Scottish nonagenarian) to rest. SY

311 Leith Walk, EH6 8SA (also Wheatfield St and Newhaven)

Noodles & Dumplings Sichuan

During a long month working every day at the Fringe, Noodles &Dumplings quickly became my happy place. Freshly hand-pulled noodles and hand-wrapped dumplings are rarely bad, but what makes this place stand out are its accompanying dishes. The cold plate mixed salad is beautifully seasoned and not too oily, while the skewers are moreish and not too salty. It also offers Chengdu-style hot pots that are great to share on a cold day, and the garlic broth delivers on its flavourful promise, all of which makes this place one of my favourite restaurants in the city. SK

23 South Clerk St, EH8 9JD

Glasgow

Sean Wai Keung

The first recorded Chinese restaurant in Glasgow, Wah Yen, opened on the Govan Road in 1948. As the more traditional shipbuilding industries, which had previously attracted Chinese migrants to the city, declined through the 1950s and 1960s, the number of food-focused places only grew. While Wah Yen didn’t survive, the Glasgow Chinatown complex opened its doors in 1992. It featured 15 indoor units, a large restaurant and a traditional gate. It was in the Cowcaddens area to the north of the city, and was both a means of promoting Chinese businesses to those outside the community and a home for organisation and solidarity, working with other organisations such as Wing Hong Elderly Group to provide information on issues like housing and visas.

Unfortunately the complex itself has been in steady decline over the last decade, with a range of factors, including the pandemic, to blame. Despite this, Cowcaddens itself is still a major hub for Chinese businesses in the city, while over in the West End a new kind of ‘Chinatown’ is blossoming, with its restaurants catering more towards the growing Chinese student population at Glasgow University. This combination of newer restaurants alongside more long-established ones, as well as a few surprises in unexpected places, has ensured Glasgow’s continued position as one of Scotland’s best cities for Chinese food.

Read Sean’s full guide to Glasgow’s best Chinese restaurants here.

Liverpool

EB – Emily Beswick. JN – Jonathan Nunn. BP – Beatrice Png. HLL – Hai Lin Leung. RCJ ­– Ruth Cheung Judge. IR – Isaac Rangaswami. SMN – Sufea Mohamad Noor. LT – Lisa Tse. HT – Helen Tse.

Liverpool is home to Europe’s oldest Chinese community. Its Chinatown, near the docks, served the Chinese seafarers (as well as those from the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) who have passed through and settled in the city since the 1880s. With the arrival of postwar migrants from Hong Kong, Chinese food then expanded via takeaways, which popped up in the suburbs and on the Wirral. Chinese families took over chip shops, fusing English comfort food with Chinese flavours to create the city’s signature salt and pepper everything – chips, ribs and siu mai.

The installation of Chinatown’s enormous arch in 2000, a gift from Liverpool’s twin city, Shanghai, heralded a new era of international students from mainland China to the city. Mini-Chinatowns sprung up to supply these contemporary sojourners, including Myrtle Street’s row of grocery shops and cafes and a cluster of hot pot restaurants on London Road. However, Liverpool’s historical Chinatown on Nelson Street is quiet for most of the year, coming alive only during Lunar New Year celebrations. Recent efforts have tried to bring the area back to life, including the trial of a new street market. But maybe Liverpool’s Chinatown hints at the future of Chinatowns in the UK: a mix of old-school dim sum parlours, flourishing takeaways and new Malaysian and Vietnamese spots, unconfined to a single street. EB

Read the full Vittles guide to Liverpool’s Chinatown here.

London

JN – Jonathan Nunn. AH – Angela Hui. EZ – Elaine Zhao. SC – Siqi Chong. GC – Guan Chua. ZS – Zoe Suen. FD – Fuchsia Dunlop. BB – Barclay Bram. DB – Dan Biddulph. IR – Isaac Rangaswami. MAC – Montague Ashley-Craig. AW – Anto Wu. FL – @foodinlondon. LT – Liz Tray.

The concept of Chinatown as we commonly understand it emerged from a very specific set of circumstances at the turn of the 20th century, when Cantonese sailors with meagre resources were forced to make creative use of limited space in their new cities. In London, this began at the docks in Limehouse and moved to Soho in the 1960s, when migrants from Hong Kong and the New Territories took on cheap leases in what was then considered an undesirable part of the city. Many had been displaced by wartime bombing and rebuilt their businesses around a tight cluster of streets between Leicester Square and Soho. Alongside restaurants sat Chinese supermarkets, traditional Chinese medicine clinics, massage parlours, video stores, cinemas and a handful of betting shops tucked into side corners, all part of the same compact ecosystem.

That era of Chinatown is over. The Soho Chinatown – the place that most Londoners would think of when they hear the word ‘Chinatown’ – is no longer the only centre of Chinese culture in the city. New types of Chinatowns are flourishing across the city, in places where Chinese people actually live. What this means is that there has never been another time in London’s history when you can eat better and more widely across China’s rich diversity of regional cuisines. For the first time ever, across more than 80 restaurants and 15 distinct cuisines, we have compiled a guide on where to eat them, in London’s six (and counting) Chinatowns.

Read more about London’s historic and new Chinatowns and a Vittles guide to their restaurants here.

Manchester

Lisa and Helen Tse

Manchester’s Chinatown is compact – just half a square mile bounded by Moseley, Charlotte, Princess and Portland Streets, with the grand Imperial Chinese arch at its heart, a gift from China and a reminder of the old Sino-British textile trade that built this city. The food has shifted over the years: what was once solidly Cantonese now runs hot with Sichuan peppercorns and the vinegary punch of northern noodle joints. Stalwarts like Kwok Man and Hong Kong have closed, but things are shifting back as new waves of Hong Kong immigrants arrive, bringing with them the sweet-savoury char siu and the crackle of roast pork belly. Old Chinese acupuncture clinics sit beside new Taiwanese bubble tea stalls; herbalists who’ve been grinding the same remedies for forty years share a wall with hot-pot joints where university students queue for numbing broth.

During the pandemic, Manchester became home to the UK’s largest Chinese population, accounting for 3.4% of the national total. The rents may be brutal, and the economic headwinds real, but the community holds. This is not a Chinatown that performs for tourists. It just cooks, day after day, better than it has any right to. If you come hungry, you’ll eat things you’ve never heard of, cooked by people who’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, and it will absolutely ruin you for anywhere else.

Read Lisa and Helen’s full guide to Manchester’s Chinatown here.

Newcastle

LP – Leah Pattem. EK ­– Eve Kossman.

Pop Up Wok HQ 爆大鑊 Hong Kong

Lucia Tsoi and Molly Chan are not chefs by training; they just cook the way they always did in Hong Kong, their home until 2014, when they both moved to Newcastle as students. As a result, the food at Pop Up Wok isn’t traditional Hong Kong cuisine in the rigid sense. Instead, it celebrates the movement of Hongkongers and the cultures they’ve consumed over centuries – think Satay beef noodles with peanut butter French toast. It’s food that flips the script on culinary migration, and it’s all the better for it. LP

16 Saville Row, NE1 8JE

Sky Chinese Cantonese

Ascending in the lift from the bustling Stowell Street to Sky Chinese Cuisine is one of the great pleasures of visiting Newcastle, whether you’re looking for traditional pork and cashew dumplings, crispy mooli cake, fluffy siu mai or Anglo-Chinese classics. Be sure to order the trio of roast meats over rice and pair it with the extremely moreish cheung fun (note: both are only served until 5pm). EK

20 Stowell St, NE1 4XQ

Breadpoint Cantonese/bakery

It’s likely that you’ll smell Breadpoint before you see it. The aromas from this long-running Hong Kong bakery, which pumps out freshly baked Cantonese-style breads, buns, cakes and pastries, will draw you in like a cartoon scent trail. Beyond the cutesy font and red interiors, there’s a classic pick-and-mix tray setup, where you can load up on sausage buns, pineapple buns and the more unusual bear-shaped ones. A personal favourite is the seaweed and custard bun: it has the ideal ratio of sweet to salty. EK

13 Low Friar St, NE1 5UE

Oxford

Harin Turrell

Tse Noodle Cantonese/Malaysian

Since it opened in 2019, Tse Noodle has become a firm favourite among the student community for its central location, speedy service and reasonable prices. Come for the noodle soups – particularly the scallion oil chicken, although the aromatic beef and prawn wonton are equally strong contenders. Expect springy noodles, chicken skin so crisp it’s still sizzling, and the pure comfort of sesame and scallion-steeped broth when you inevitably lift the bowl to lap up the last traces. The eponymous Mr Tse is now more likely to be found at his follow-up restaurant, Qin, which has an almost identical menu but at slightly hiked prices, justified by the addition of tenderstem broccoli and a greater likelihood of finding a table (it’s a bit outside the centre of town). But the original site has a je ne sais quoi that always draws me back; maybe it’s the steam that swallows you, or the squeeze of getting to your seat. Get choosing quickly, because there’s a queue behind you, and don’t forget to dash to Natwest before the food arrives, it’s cash only. HT

8 Ship St, OX1 3DA

Café Orient (Zhang Ji) Sichuan/Dongbei

Cowley, in the south of Oxford, has at least seven restaurants that serve Chinese food. Café Orient, the first you encounter if you are coming from the city centre, conveniently happens to be the best of the bunch. Don’t be fooled by its generic name (which is different online anyway: Zhang Ji). For a simple solo dine, the yo po mian, bouncy hand-stretched noodles slicked with punchy housemade chilli oil, does not disappoint – the ratio of grease, spice, acid and texture is done satisfyingly right. If you are in a rice kind of mood, the pairing of jiggly, pepper-heavy mapo tofu and charred, dry-fried green beans never goes amiss, either. Better yet, bring company and you could try it all. HT

170 Cowley Rd, OX4 1UE

Fusion House Cantonese/Sichuan/Dongbei

Fusion House looks like an unassuming takeaway at first glance, but up its narrow staircase, you will find a serene restaurant space. I can’t suggest much apart from the dry hot pot, because I seldom stray from this near-perfect dish. The contents of the pot can be personalised, but some ingredients wear Fusion House’s fiery, addictive and, frankly, unmatched, mala coat particularly well, such as the fatty curls of thinly sliced beef, the crumbly bites of cauliflower and the knuckly crunch of wood ear mushrooms (‘edible tree fungus’ on the menu). These are my personal favourites, but I encourage experimentation and an open mind. If you’re looking for variety, the fried thin sheets of bean curd with padron peppers and guo bao ruo (double fried pork tossed in a sweet and sour dressing) are also worth your attention. And if you are served by the lady with the bob (her name is Elsa), be nice to her: she might give you candied winter melon. HT

126 Cowley Road, OX41JE

Sheffield

Kerre Chen

Sheffield’s food and drink scene has quietly flourished over the past decade, shaped in no small part by its large East Asian community. The city now has a strong roster of excellent Chinese restaurants, many of them long-standing, well-loved and fiercely reliable. I’m Chinese myself, and as a Sheffield-based food blogger, I’ve spent years eating my way across the city. While newer developments like New Era Square – often described as Sheffield’s Chinatown – have brought renewed visibility to the scene, the places worth travelling for are spread far wider. This list brings together the places I return to time and time again.

A Journey to Chengdu Sichuan

Tucked inside New Era Square, Sheffield’s answer to a modern Chinatown, A Journey to Chengdu cooks the food of Sichuan with unflinching confidence. The mapo tofu is silken and volcanic, its surface shimmering with crimson oil. The deep-fried pork arrives dusted in tongue-tingling peppercorns and crackles in the most satisfying way. The braised pig trotters are glossy, gelatinous and far better than they are ever given credit for. You can also build your own traditional maocai, choosing from vegetables, meats and seafood before everything is steeped in a bubbling, spicy broth. The space is contemporary, with huge windows and sleek panels, but the flavours remain resolutely traditional. It’s one of the best examples of how New Era Square combines modern dining with cultural roots.

Unit 9, 9 New Era Square, Highfield, S2 4RB

Chinatown Restaurant Cantonese/dim sum

A cornerstone of Sheffield’s Chinese dining scene, Chinatown Restaurant is where families gather for weekend dim sum and gossip over pots of puerh tea. Steaming baskets fill the tables with silky cheung fun folded around prawns, XO-fried radish cake with crisp edges and molten salted egg custard buns that ooze gold. Don’t skip the three roasties: glossy char siu, lacquered roast duck and shatter-crisp pork belly. Regulars are recognised on sight, and the chatter of Sheffield’s Chinese community fills the air like background music. The venue is equally known for its traditional wedding banquets: dish after dish lands on the table like milestones in a long celebration, including whole suckling pig, lobster, abalone and mock shark fin soup.

27 London Rd, Highfield, S2 4LA

Noodle Plus Lanzhou/Shaanxi

At Noodle Plus, the draw is right there in the name, and in the window. Watch as the noodle master effortlessly stretches and slaps dough into long, elastic ribbons, a hypnotic ritual of skill and strength that never fails to gather onlookers. He’s bounced around several noodle joints across the city, but wherever he goes, the masses follow. Choose from Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles with plenty of bite and bounce, Shaanxi knife-cut noodles or biang biang belt noodles, which are then plunged into broth and served steaming. The braised beef brisket is the local favourite, rich in five-spice and soy, generous in portion and layered with warmth. Affordable, filling and utterly satisfying, this is no-frills comfort food elevated by craft and best enjoyed with lashings of chilli oil.

255 Glossop Rd, Broomhall, S10 2GZ

Wah Lok Yuen Hong Kong

Wah Lok Yuen brings the cha chaan teng experience to Sheffield. For those who have spent a decent amount of time in Hong Kong, it’s a hit of instant nostalgia: bright colours, plastic stools, laminated menus and glass display cabinets stacked with pastries, all of which echo the diners many Hongkongers grew up visiting. Plates of scrambled eggs with buttered toast and satay beef noodles arrive fast and the Hong Kong milk tea, brewed the traditional silk-stocking way and served in those famed cups, is perfectly balanced – strong, tannic, and smooth. Its silky soft rice noodle rolls are a standout. Made from scratch, they’re dressed the old-school way with soy, sesame and chilli sauce. The egg tarts are just as good, with a buttery shortcrust base and a gentle wobbling custard centre that’s best eaten warm if you’re lucky enough to catch them fresh out of the oven.

132 Infirmary Rd, S6 3DH

Golden Dragon Restaurant Hakka

Golden Dragon opened in the last year, taking over from a sushi restaurant, and, unusually, specialises in traditional Hakka cuisine, which is rare to find anywhere in the UK. Chef Ben, who comes from Hong Kong, uses no MSG – instead long braises coax depth from tougher cuts of meat, layered aromatics come from fermented beans and preserved vegetables, and cooking techniques build flavour over hours. Each dish is shaped by patience and memory, and some orders require advance notice – a mark of their care. The slow-braised old duck is deeply savoury, the stewed herbal chicken with yellow wine soothing and nourishing, while the pickled mustard greens bring a sharp, tangy counterpoint, balancing out the richness of everything else.

6 Sheldon Rd, Nether Edge, S7 1GW

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Welcome back to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. Today’s newsletter is the largest guide ever written for the London Chinatowns. It covers six ‘Chinatowns’ serving six different communities: the historical London Chinatowns of Soho and Queensway, as well as the new styles of Chinatown emerging in Bloomsbury, Spitalfields, Colindale–Hendon and the Docklands. As this is a long post, we recommend reading it in full via our website here.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

The concept of Chinatown as we commonly understand it emerged from a very specific set of circumstances at the turn of the twentieth century, when Cantonese sailors with meagre resources were forced to make creative use of limited space in their new cities. In London, this began at the docks in Limehouse and moved to Soho in the 1960s, when migrants from Hong Kong and the New Territories took on cheap leases in what was then considered an undesirable part of the city. Many had been displaced by wartime bombing and rebuilt their businesses around a tight cluster of streets between Leicester Square and Soho. Alongside restaurants sat Chinese supermarkets, traditional Chinese medicine clinics, massage parlours, video stores, cinemas and a handful of betting shops tucked into side corners, all part of the same compact ecosystem.

That era of Chinatown is over. The Soho Chinatown – the place that most Londoners would think of when they hear the word ‘Chinatown’ – is no longer the only centre of Chinese culture in the city. New types of Chinatowns are flourishing across the city, in places where Chinese people actually live. To the historical Chinatowns of Soho and Queensway, you can add the conurbations from Bloomsbury to King’s Cross, and from Spitalfields to Aldgate, that have been utterly transformed by the university and housing markets, and which cater to a new demographic of students. In Colindale and Hendon you will find a satellite Chinatown catering to second-generation Cantonese families and new arrivals from Hong Kong on BNO passports. And in the Docklands, on the site of the first Chinatown, you will find a sprawling, unplanned ecosystem of gigantic dim sum parlours and regional Chinese restaurants, making use of the area’s unique topography.

What this means is that there has never been another time in London’s history when you can eat better and more widely across China’s rich diversity of regional cuisines. For the first time ever, across more than eighty restaurants and fifteen distinct cuisines, we have compiled a guide on where to eat them, in London’s six (and counting) Chinatowns.

Contributors

JN – Jonathan Nunn. AH – Angela Hui. EZ – Elaine Zhao. SC – Siqi Chong. GC – Guan Chua. ZS – Zoe Suen. FD – Fuchsia Dunlop. BB – Barclay Bram. DB – Dan Biddulph. IR – Isaac Rangaswami. MAC – Montague Ashley-Craig. AW – Anto Wu. FL – @foodinlondon. LT – Liz Tray.

Soho Chinatown

While Chinatown was once primarily a place for the Chinese community, today it is a mirror of central London itself – a mix of cultures, cuisines and generations, constantly shifting, full of energy and impermanence. The neighbourhood is almost unrecognisable from what it was even ten years ago; restaurants change hands fast and often without much fanfare, pushed out by rising rents. In recent years, Brexit and Covid-related staff shortages, have led to a shrinking pool of skilled wok and dim sum chefs, while changing tastes and demographics have altered the type of restaurant that opens here. What was once a stronghold of Cantonese roast meats and dim sum banquet halls has evolved into a pan-Asian bubble tea slurping, jiggly soufflé pancake queuing and custard taiyaki snacking TikTok town.

Still, Soho’s Chinatown remains one of the great central London neighbourhoods for eating out. Everyone – theatregoers, tourists, late night revellers – passes through it, which means each restaurant fulfils a function. It contains everything from tiny street food stalls selling oyster cakes and jianbing, to Haidilao, the gigantic Chinese hot pot chain that approximates a Harvester if it was directed by Zhang Yimou. And in its longstanding institutions – Wong Kei, New Loon Fung, Lido, anywhere that owns its freehold – Chinatown has its unwavering anchors, there through it all, even as everything changes around them.

Old Town 97 Cantonese

Chinatown used to be a village of nighthawks but it’s only Old Town left that still caters for the outcasts, late-night revellers and post-shift chefs. The best food here has the tenor of a great midnight snack: ho fun in slippery egg sauce, equal parts charred and gloopy; salted egg yolk chicken wings; seafood fried ‘fragrant and spicy 香辣’ (translated on the menu as ‘spicy golden leaf’) that leaves your lips buzzing with lemongrass and sambal. Old Town is infamous for its absurd off-menu dishes for students with iron stomachs. ‘LSE rice’ is egg to the power of three: pork belly in honey and pepper egg sauce, egg fried rice and a fried egg on top, although I prefer the Ah Ming fried rice, with crispy pork and fried balls of tofu. JN

19 Wardour St, W1D 6PL

Cafe TPT Cantonese

Cafe TPT is a template for how all Cantonese restaurants in London can and should be – competent at everything and exceptional at a select few standouts. There’s the creamy beef flank curry that reduces down in its stone pot, the blistered, caramelised green beans and the soft shell crab stir-fried typhoon shelter-style with chilli and curry leaves, but also, ingeniously, with cornflakes. Or the pork chop Macau-style with onions and cheesy béchamel – a chaise longue of a comfort dish, best eaten in the late hours to soak up a Soho night. I cannot be objective about this place. The most meaningful relationship of my adult life is the one I have with the laoban, who, in fifteen years, has acknowledged that I’m a regular on exactly two occasions. JN

21 Wardour St, W1D 6PN

C&R Cafe Malaysian/Cantonese

Located down a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alley off Rupert Street, C&R Café is one of Chinatown’s worst-kept secrets and rightly so. This Malaysian joint has been dishing out comfort food since the late nineties, with its laksa the star of the show: a fiery, coconut-rich broth packed with prawns, tofu puffs, fish balls and slippery vermicelli noodles. Stir-frying here is a strength: the C&R wat tan hor is among the best in London, but even better is the chai tow kwai (radish and rice cakes) with each of their six cube faces blackened from the wok, plus a heap of beansprouts and tiny umami-jolts of preserved radish. Pro tip: if you sit close to the back you can steal Speedboat Bar’s wi-fi. AH + JN

4–5 Rupert Court, W1D 6DY

Lotus Garden Cantonese/dim sum

I often used to come to Lotus Garden specifically for siu yuk on rice, which I marginally prefer to its rivals in Chinatown on taste and price. That is, until last year, when I bumped into Super 8’s Songsoo Kim, who recommended I get the prawn and chive dumplings, plus a deep cut from the cheung fun menu: a crispy bean curd roll stuffed with sesame and prawn cake. Since then, I’ve never deviated from this order. I’ve never seen the cheung fun anywhere else exactly as it is here: a textural riot from the addition of toasted sesame. It’s one of the best single items in the whole of Chinatown. JN

15a Gerrard St, W1D 6JD

Wong Kei Cantonese

Opened in 1972, this cash-only Cantonese canteen is the stuff of legend. Sprawled over four floors, the menu is a beast – so long and varied that no mortal could realistically conquer it (except maybe Joshua Armstrong, the obsessive behind the Library of Alexandria Wong Kei Tumblr, who ate and documented his way through every combination on offer). If you’re dining solo, go for the wonton noodle soup, assorted meat ho fun and the barbecue cold meat on hot rice. If in a group, order the black-bean-stuffed green peppers, bean curd and aubergine and plenty of stir-fried morning glory. Or just point to whatever the table next to you is having. The chances are it’ll be great. And whatever lands on your table, wash it down with the pot of free tea and a generous spoonful of the communal table chilli oil. AH

41–43 Wardour St, W1D 6PX

Haidilao Sichuan/hot pot

China’s premier hot pot chain might not look like much from the street in Piccadilly. But its ground-floor room is merely the waiting area (where you can get your nails done, for free). The restaurant itself is in a cavernous basement at least a football pitch in length. It’s raucous with birthdays and the signature noodle dance, which on my last two visits have been deftly performed by waiters from Ghana. There are other hot pot restaurants in London with more upscale ingredients, but Haidilao has always been about the experience while delivering a consistent meal. It’s also low-key one of the best vegan restaurants in the city, with two distinct vegan hot pot bases and enough varieties of tofu to marvel at the delicate flexibility of the humble soybean. BB

Unit 4, 5 Coventry St, W1D 7DH; Unit 7.0.9, The O2, SE10 0DX

Real Beijing Food House Beijing/Xi’an/Sichuan

If any one restaurant represents the new Chinatown it’s Food House, which has cult status among young Chinese students taking respite from Dover Street Market in red oil noodles. The menu is shared between Sichuan – dry hot pots and whole fish cooked in chilli oil – and heartier northern and central Chinese fare of belt noodles, rou jia mo (flatbreads with meat) and skewers. Everything is great, but I love the red oil noodles with wide-belt la mian, the width of a classroom ruler, mixed at the table with pak choi and dry lamb or beef, so that each belt is coated in a scarlet slick of chilli oil. Simple but brilliant. Make sure to bring heads, as this is one of the few places where dumplings can be ordered by the thirty. JN

46 Gerrard St, W1D 5QH

After the paywall: more than 70 Chinese restaurants across London serving food from Hong Kong, Sichuan, Dongbei, Lanzhou, Yunnan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Ningbo, Hunan, Henan and more.

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Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this guide, Lap-fai Lee picks the best restaurants in Birmingham’s Chinatown, which is still primarily centred on the local Chinese community but has evolved with the advent of Chinese students and the recent influx of Hong Kong migrants.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

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Birmingham’s Chinatown is not a tourist destination like the London equivalent. It is a living Chinatown; our businesses primarily cater to the local Chinese community. Growing up, we would go to Hor Tung for dim sum, but below the restaurant was a Chinese shop that seemed to sell everything, including copies of Hong Kong shows on VHS for rent. When the old Bull Ring was demolished, the Chinese community shifted its focus to The Arcadian, Hurst Street and Ladywell Walk, and more restaurants, Hong Kong-style bakeries, Cantonese BBQ joints and noodle shops started to open. When Chinese students arrived in the 2000s to study at Birmingham’s three universities, mainland Chinese flavours arrived with them. I will always remember my first taste of Sichuan boiled beef 水煮牛肉 – it was so different to the Cantonese and Hakka food I grew up eating at home.

With the recent influx of Hong Kong immigrants, the pendulum has swung back. The cha chaan teng diners are now in, bringing back that nostalgic colonial comfort food to dear old Blighty. With all the redevelopment in Southside – the district’s recent nomenclature – the area is now buzzing with activity and opportunity. Yet despite the changes, Chinatown continues to reflect the Birmingham spirit; it’s quiet and industrious, always self-deprecating. We’re confident in who we are and what we have to offer. All you have to do is come with an open mind. You will find something delicious, but more likely you will find a mind-blowing dish from a place you’ve never heard of, and it will change your life.

Peach Garden 桃苑 and Look In 樂意燒味 Cantonese/siu mei

Birmingham Chinatown is very good at Cantonese barbecue due, in large part, to the brothers who opened Peach Garden. Then they had a bust-up and one of them opened Look In. This is the city derby for Canto BBQ fans; you’re either Peach Garden Rovers or Look In Utd. But people who think there is a real difference between the two offerings are mistaken. They’re the same. The only real difference is in the timing because real barbecue fans know fresh is best. That’s why, when deciding where to go, you should simply peer through both windows at the lacquered roast meats. Analyse the crispness of the pork crackling and the juiciness of the char siu. Choose where to dine solely on what looks delicious right now. Peach Garden is slightly bigger. On Mondays and Tuesdays, if you come early enough, there is roast piglet available too.

Peach Garden, Unit 4–6 Bath Passage, Ladywell Walk, B5 4SZ

Look In, 6 Ladywell Walk, B5 4ST

After the paywall: recommendations for the best Cantonese, Sichuan, Shandong and Yunnanese cuisine – including the only good noodle specialist in Birmingham.

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Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this guide, Lisa and Helen Tse share their pick of restaurants in Manchester’s Chinatown, serving the UK’s largest Chinese population. Cantonese cuisine still reigns supreme, but new openings offering Gansu specialities and hot pot are helping to keep the community alive.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Liverpool, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

Subscribe now

Manchester’s Chinatown is compact – just half a square mile bounded by Moseley, Charlotte, Princess and Portland Streets, with the grand Imperial Chinese arch at its heart, a gift from China and a reminder of the old Sino-British textile trade that built this city. The food has shifted over the years: what was once solidly Cantonese now runs hot with Sichuan peppercorns and the vinegary punch of northern noodle joints. Stalwarts like Kwok Man and Hong Kong have closed, but things are shifting back as new waves of Hong Kong immigrants arrive, bringing with them the sweet-savoury char siu and the crackle of roast pork belly. Old Chinese acupuncture clinics sit beside new Taiwanese bubble tea stalls; herbalists who’ve been grinding the same remedies for forty years share a wall with hot-pot joints where university students queue for numbing broth.

During the pandemic, Manchester became home to the UK’s largest Chinese population, accounting for 3.4% of the national total. The rents may be brutal, and the economic headwinds real, but the community holds. This is not a Chinatown that performs for tourists. It just cooks, day after day, better than it has any right to. If you come hungry, you’ll eat things you’ve never heard of, cooked by people who’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, and it will absolutely ruin you for anywhere else.

Only Yu Cantonese

The lift’s often broken, so the first test at Only Yu is the stairs. If you can manage two flights, you’ll be rewarded. Only Yu is run by two chefs and two front-of-house pros who’ve spent decades making other people’s restaurants great. Now they’re doing it for themselves, and you can taste the creative freedom. Red rice seafood cheung fun is a love letter to innovation that’s studded with prawns and scallops, every bite luxurious and silky. Charcoal har gau sounds gimmicky, but it’s packed with prawn mousse, while the Ibérico cha siu is so fatty and soft, you’ll forget where you are for a moment. This is a place you’ll climb for again.

@only_yu_mcr

ONLY_YU_MCR on Instagram: "Have you tired our special Red Cheun…

1st Floor, Connaught Building, 58 George St, M1 4HF

Chef Diao Cantonese/dim sum

Chef Diao has been cooking for more than thirty-five years, and it’s evident in every dish. He knows dim sum and hand-pulled noodles like the back of his hand, with an instinct only decades of repetition can give. In Manchester, where good dim sum is expected, Chef Diao still manages to stand out. Har gau skins are paper-thin, the filling plump and sweet. The siu mai have that perfect ratio of pork to prawn, which makes you immediately want to order another round, while the noodles are springy and irregular, each strand carrying effort and care. Chef Diao’s food reminds you why dim sum takes years to master.

92–94 Oldham St, M4 1LJ

After the paywall: a late-night Cantonese spot offering beef brisket and wonton noodles; monster portions of baked pork chop rice; and a Gansu restaurant with some of the best noodles in the city.

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Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this guide, our local experts share their pick of the best places to eat in Liverpool’s historic Chinatown, as well as some more recent openings offering a range of regional cuisines.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Cambridge and Glasgow), by various

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Liverpool is home to Europe’s oldest Chinese community. Its Chinatown, near the docks, served the Chinese seafarers (as well as those from the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) who have passed through and settled in the city since the 1880s. With the arrival of postwar migrants from Hong Kong, Chinese food then expanded via takeaways, which popped up in the suburbs and on the Wirral. Chinese families took over chip shops, fusing English comfort food with Chinese flavours to create the city’s signature salt and pepper everything – chips, ribs and siu mai.

The installation of Chinatown’s enormous arch in 2000, a gift from Liverpool’s twin city, Shanghai, heralded a new era of international students from mainland China to the city. Mini-Chinatowns sprung up to supply these contemporary sojourners, including Myrtle Street’s row of grocery shops and cafes and a cluster of hot pot restaurants on London Road. However, Liverpool’s historical Chinatown on Nelson Street is quiet for most of the year, coming alive only during Lunar New Year celebrations. Recent efforts have tried to bring the area back to life, including the trial of a new street market. But maybe Liverpool’s Chinatown hints at the future of Chinatowns in the UK: a mix of old-school dim sum parlours, flourishing takeaways and new Malaysian and Vietnamese spots, unconfined to a single street. Emily Beswick

Contributors

EB – Emily Beswick. JN – Jonathan Nunn. BP – Beatrice Png. HLL – Hai Lin Leung. RCJ – Ruth Cheung Judge. IR – Isaac Rangaswami. SMN – Sufea Mohamad Noor.

eJoy Asian Supermarket Cantonese/Shanghai/Sichuan

On the edge of the university campus sits eJoy, part Asian supermarket, part food court, all-round lunch haven. E-Jia Dim Sum, with a chef from Guandong, serves Cantonese, Malaysian and Singapore favourites, including some of the city’s crispiest siu yuk. Ba Guai Soup Bun specialises in xiao long bao, but offers a wide range of mix-and-match handmade dumplings for £8. By midday, eJoy is packed with students, lecturers and builders and it’s possible to pay via Weibo and WeChat. eJoy speaks to the multi-layered nature of East Asian life in Liverpool, and trying a bit of everything makes for a fun lunchtime. RCJ (with thanks to Zi Ye for Mandarin translation)

1 Myrtle Parade, L7 7EL

No.1 Chongqing Fish and Original Chicken Sichuan/Chongqing

I first came across this idiosyncratic basement restaurant on the short walk between Liverpool’s two great cathedrals – one Protestant, one Catholic – seduced by the sign that promises No.1 Chongqing Fish and Original Chicken. Although the name refers to China’s great megacity, the menu is really all over the place, a kind of hodgepodge of whatever the owners like: excellent Guilin noodles, or a delicious version of huangmenji (yellow braised chicken), a Dongbei dish that has been mainstreamed across China. If it has a speciality, it may be the sour-spicy Chongqing fish hot pot for two or the maocai, a kind of solo hot pot, which comes with three meats and two veg of your choice in a spicy broth for under a tenner. JN

109 Mount Pleasant, L3 5TF

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Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. In this guide, Sean Wai Keung shares his picks of Glasgow’s best Chinese fare, including long-standing traditional restaurants in Cowcaddens, the historical centre of the city’s Chinese community, as well as more recent, regional openings in the West End.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge), by various

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The first recorded Chinese restaurant in Glasgow, Wah Yen, opened on the Govan Road in 1948. As the more traditional shipbuilding industries, which had previously attracted Chinese migrants to the city, declined through the 1950s and 1960s, the number of food-focused places only grew. While Wah Yen didn’t survive, the Glasgow Chinatown complex opened its doors in 1992. It featured fifteen indoor units, a large restaurant and a traditional gate. It was in the Cowcaddens area to the north of the city, and was both a means of promoting Chinese businesses to those outside the community and a home for organisation and solidarity, working with other organisations such as Wing Hong Elderly Group to provide information on issues like housing and visas.

Unfortunately the complex itself has been in steady decline over the last decade, with a range of factors, including the pandemic, to blame. Despite this, Cowcaddens itself is still a major hub for Chinese businesses in the city, while over in the West End a new kind of ‘Chinatown’ is blossoming, with its restaurants catering more towards the growing Chinese student population at Glasgow University. This combination of newer restaurants alongside more long-established ones, as well as a few surprises in unexpected places, has ensured Glasgow’s continued position as one of Scotland’s best cities for Chinese food.

Loon Fung Cantonese/dim sum

Loon Fung opened in 1971 and has been specialising in dim sum ever since. While other places, including Chinatown Restaurant, have at times threatened its crown as the go-to place for yum cha in the city, Loon Fung’s longevity has ensured that it remains number one to many. Indeed, Chinese families from all over Scotland will have shared a meal together there at some point in their history and many multi-generational families will have memories of the restaurant stretching back decades. My favourites include the chicken feet in black bean sauce as well as the turnip cake and satay whelks.

411–413 Sauchiehall St, G2 3LG

Wah Kee Bakery Cantonese

While Chinatown has seen its fortunes rise and fall, one of the few businesses still alive there is Wah Kee, the type of old-school bakery guaranteed to bring nostalgia to anyone looking to enjoy a cha siu bao or a dan taat. Grab a tray and orange tongs and choose from a selection of classics, including meat floss buns and bolo bao as well as seasonal delicacies like mooncakes. Sitting in Wah Kee with a bun and a milk tea, it’s easy to be transported through time and, just for a moment, experience a taste of Glasgow’s Chinatown of old.

Unit 1–2, 42–46 New City Rd, G4 9JT

After the paywall: claypots, home-cooked-style Hong Kong food worth travelling for, and Southwest cuisine on the Southside worthy of the hype.

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Welcome to the Vittles Chinatowns Project. This guide offers an overview of Cambridge’s emerging Chinese restaurant scene. While the town doesn’t have a historic Chinatown, its large Chinese student population makes it one of the most exciting places in the country for regional Chinese cuisine.

You can read the rest of the project here:

Who is Chinatown for?, by Xiao Ma
The New Chinatowns, by Barclay Bram
Crying in Wing Yip, by various
The Vittles Guide to London’s Chinatowns, by various
The Vittles Guide to the UK’s Chinatowns (including individual guides to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow), by various

Subscribe now

According to the 2021 Census, Cambridgeshire has the highest proportional population of ethnic Chinese residents in the UK. While Cambridge’s Chinese migration history parallels London’s in some ways, its food scene has largely sidestepped the recent patterns that have swept through the capital’s dining scene: there are barely any Sichuan concepts or biang biang noodle joints, and new restaurant openings are rare due to a high concentration of university-owned buildings, expensive commercial rents and students opting for the sanctuary of college dining halls. Instead, Cambridge offers peripheral regional cuisines that, in some cases, arrived here before reaching London, and I maintain that the best xiao long baos in the UK can be found in the city.

With no centralised Chinatown, the city’s Chinese restaurants can instead be found in dispersed culinary pockets – in residential neighbourhoods, bubbled together along the peripheries of the local shopping centre or along the bustling Mill Road, which houses most of the city’s best independent food shops and restaurants. Cici Peng

Contributors

CP – Cici Peng
EML – Edward Moon Little
SC – Siqi Chong.

1+1 Rougamo Xi’an

1+1, the first Xi’an restaurant in Cambridge, was so successful that it has now opened a London branch in Holborn, a reversal of the usual expansion story. My favourite dish is the vegetarian rougamo, a sort of Chinese burger typically made with minced meat stuffed inside crispy flatbread. The veggie version is lighter, filled with crunchy veg in a sharp, garlic and vinegar dressing that piques the tongue and sits delightfully against the flaky dough – particularly in the warmer seasons when paired with the liangpi cold noodles. In winter, I opt for the lamb broth with handmade dao xiao noodles, which taste gamey in the best way, and the fish with sauerkraut noodles. It includes a delightfully sour broth that leans heavy on pickled mustard greens and sichuan peppercorn, rendering the velveteen layers of white fish even more tender. Sometimes, I get the braised chicken feet as a snack to go – they’re sold in vacuum packs for that very purpose. CP

84 Regent St, CB2 1DP

After the paywall: a husband–wife duo selling Shanghai-style cuisine, plus recommendations for Northern Jiaozi and Tianjin, Yunnanese and Sichuan spots.

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