Six of One: The Cantonese New Wave
Six of the best new Hong Kong restaurants to try this weekend.
During the last five years, a new type of Hong Kong restaurant has emerged in London, mostly propelled by new arrivals on British National (Overseas) passports. Many of these businesses, starting with Aquila in Leytonstone and Hoko on Brick Lane, have concentrated on styles of cooking that are unique to Hong Kong and rare in China, such as the more Westernised dishes of the cha chaan teng. They have been joined, in the last couple of years, by increasingly distinct restaurants: like Blue Sheep in Norbury, Sutton’s laksa specialist Little Nyonya, Wamimichi in Hendon, and Caledonian Road’s Come Back In.
Lately, Hong Kong food businesses, whether they’re cha chaan tengs or even more specialised, have reached a singularity where they’re opening faster than they can be counted. Today’s Six of One, nevertheless, is an attempt to document some of them. In this newsletter, you’ll find French toast and beef brisket curries, but also pork chop polo baos, rice rolls, elite roast meats, tong sui, black sesame soup and stocking milk tea. Enjoy them while they’re rarities: in five years, hopefully they’ll be everywhere.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.
Today’s Six of One has contributions from Jonathan Nunn, Siqi Chong, Zoe Suen, Guan Leong, Angela Hui, and Elaine Zhao.
1. Cha Kee
The looming presence of evil (Stamford Bridge) can sometimes obscure what a genuinely varied place Fulham is. It epitomises one of the best qualities of central London – one which infuriates a new far-right who yearn for the banlieueisation of the city – which is that people from different backgrounds and different classes occupy the same area, though not without some dissonance. The curve of the Thames that isolates Fulham from the rest of London is marked by the River Café in the west and the mighty edifice of the World’s End council estate in the east. And roughly in the middle of it all is one of the city’s most interesting thoroughfares.
North End Road runs from Kensington into Fulham Broadway, and for half of its length it is a brilliant and varied food street: from mid-end Nigerian food at Pitanga to Yemeni dishes at Bab Al Yemen, from excellent Somali cooking at Sufra to Ethiopian food at Abugida. And now there’s Cha Kee. Located in a mini mall of small restaurants, it opened last year and has quickly become a hit with locals. The draw is cha chaan teng dishes: baked pork chops, French toast, HK-style beef curries. It specialises in honey-roasted char siu, slightly sweet, slightly charred, with defined striations of rendered fat. You can get it with rice and an egg, but better to get it scrambled with a glossy blanket of barely set egg, almost like a wat tan hor. Beef brisket noodles are richer and more intense than the baseline version at Wong Kei. It verges on beef tonkotsu, with huge chunks of slow-cooked brisket in translucent broth and, if you want to add them, wobbly bits of tendon to plump up your skin. The sesame prawn toast, carefully assembled, ranks up there with Uncle Wrinkle’s as the best I’ve had.
Cha Kee is already rammed on weekends, with waits of up to 90 minutes (I cannot emphasise enough how few seats there are), but you should be able to walk in easily during weekday downtimes. After a bowl of noodles or rice, you can walk through the food market, past Chelsea FC and shops that promise ‘the haute couture of doorknobs’. There are two sides to Fulham, after all. Jonathan Nunn
347 North End Rd, SW6 1NN
Behind the paywall: Pork chop polo baos, all the roast meats, red bean soup, cheung fun, siu mai, lo mein, and much more.