The Last Restaurant in Chinatown
The Last Restaurant in Chinatown
Fifty years of Wong Kei according to those who worked there, ate there, loved it and hated it. Words by Angela Hui and Jonathan Nunn.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s article is a special long read on the legendary restaurant Wong Kei, co-written by Angela Hui and Jonathan Nunn. The piece looks into Wong Kei’s history, and its current place in London’s changing Chinatown.
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The Last Restaurant in Chinatown
Fifty years of Wong Kei according to those who worked there, ate there, loved it and hated it, by Angela Hui and Jonathan Nunn
Some restaurants mark a city’s eras; others seem to exist outside of time altogether. For five decades, Wong Kei – a four-storey, 550-seater fortress of unfeasibly cheap Cantonese noodle and one-plate rice dishes – has remained untouched as London’s Chinatown has changed around it. Whether you ate at Wong Kei 50 years ago or last week, your experience will have been the same. The moment you walked through the doors, you will have been directed to a table on one of its many floors with commands to ‘sit there!’ or ‘upstairs!’ Your tea will have arrived instantly, your meal – chosen from more than 150 options, including overflowing bowls of beef brisket soup and cold meats on hot rice – will have followed minutes later. The bill will have been less than you thought it would be and it would still have been cash only. The closest Wong Kei has come to monumental change is the few months during the pandemic when it removed the communal chilli oil from the tables.
Wong Kei’s best quality – the simple fact of always being there – has turned it into an institution. It is, as one food blogger put it, the ‘Mother of all last resorts in Chinatown’, one that has fed generations of Londoners: late-night revellers coming off a Soho bacchanalia, tourists gambling on the nearest and biggest restaurant available, and solo lunch diners trying to eke out 15 minutes of solace. It has seen writer Will Self dropping acid over a plate of roast duck and documenting it in the New Statesman and witnessed Noel Gallagher during his time roadie-ing for the Inspiral Carpets (‘I used to live in that place in the 90s,’ Gallagher told The Guardian in 2010.) For all its fame, it is also impenetrable. It has no public face nor spokesperson. It doesn’t need PR or press, though it has had its share. (A Time Out review from 1992, written by Phil Harriss, starts ‘We can assure readers that the staff at Wong Kei are not prejudiced: they hate everyone equally.’) The foundation of Wong Kei’s notoriety is its ‘self-perpetuating myth’ as London’s rudest restaurant — it’s been accused of everything from throwing down plates of roast meats on tables (true) to drop-kicking unruly customers out the door (almost certainly exaggerated). Yet it has remained resolutely isolationist, even from other Chinatown restaurants. It is the restaurant equivalent of Millwall FC: its credo may as well be ‘everyone hates us, we don’t care’.
Today, however, you are as likely to find as many people who talk about the present Wong Kei with fondness, even love. Its survival means that Wong Kei has become the unlikely pole star amid a tourist theme park of buskers, bubble tea shops and dessert parlours. In the last decade, Chinatown restaurants like Cafe HK, HK Diner, Hung’s, Young Cheng, New World and Jen Cafe have all closed, making Wong Kei one of the few remaining Cantonese dai pai dong canteen-style restaurants of its type in the area. As Chinatown undergoes significant transformation, these traditional spots are dwindling, raising the question of where an old-school Cantonese restaurant like Wong Kei fits within it. It is, perhaps, the last real connection that Chinatown has with the last generation of Cantonese people from Hong Kong and Guangdong who came to the UK with nothing and built the foundations on which the neighbourhood exists today. If you tell the story of Wong Kei, you also tell the story of London’s Chinatown.
Wong Kei was by no means the first Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, but to open a double-fronted, sit-down Chinese noodle specialist in a Soho alleyway was not the obvious move it would be today. It first opened in 1973 or 1974 (typically, no one seems to be quite sure which) on a passage called Rupert Court, which is now at the heart of Chinatown but at the time housed a bookshop and a strip club. The restaurant sat across two bright neon-yellow shopfronts adorned with its Cantonese name (旺記), meaning ‘prosperous restaurant’, and the characters for ‘wheat noodles’; chefs could be spotted behind the steamed-up windows rolling and filling delicate wontons and prepping noodles alongside simmering cauldrons of soup. It was immediately popular among cash-strapped creatives, students, misfits and adventurous eaters as a place to get cheap, fast food (fish head soup cost 45p, while a set meal would set you back 90p). In his book First Quarter, the Irish architect John Tuomey recalls arriving in London and Wong Kei being an inexpensive introduction to a multicultural city: sorbetto at Bernigra’s, espresso lungo at Bar Italia, French House for port and Wong Kei for duck pancakes.
In the late 60s, ‘Chinatown’ was still a piecemeal village of Cantonese grocers, record shops, bookshops and just nine restaurants mainly congregated around Gerrard Street and Lisle Street. West of it was a smattering of new Chinese restaurants that had started to form around the theatre on Rupert Street, contrasting with the first generation of Cantonese restaurants: old stagers like Ley-On’s on Wardour Street, a chop suey restaurant opened by the actor Ley On, who had starred in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and 49th Parallel. The 60s were a heyday for Hong Kong migration to the UK, particularly students and workers from the New Territories, who swelled the ranks of London’s restaurants. Although the Immigration Act 1971 limited the movement and rights of Hongkongers as Commonwealth citizens, the often undocumented nature of restaurant work allowed Chinatown’s restaurants to thrive. By the 1980s London’s Chinatown had become official: Westminster City Council, in collaboration with the Chinese community, worked to enhance the area, revamping shopfronts, pedestrianising Gerrard Street and parts of Newport Place and Macclesfield Street, and installing the famous gates, pagoda and lion foo dogs.