Classics Revisited: could A. Wong be best Chinese restaurant in Europe?

The first time I came to A. Wong was shortly after it opened, in the afterglow of the Olympics in early 2013. I was living down the road in Dolphin Square and Wilton Road was the nearest thing I had to a high street.  If you were being nice you’d say this is Pimlico, although it’s really Victoria, which for all its shiny, Nova-ish newness will never be a restaurant destination.

As Coal Drops Yards at King’s Cross proves, people like restaurant districts that look as if they’ve been around for years, however ersatz the heritage. Kym’s, the restaurant that A.Wong replaced, really had been around for years. It was a classic high-street Cantonese owned by chef Andrew Wong’s parents.

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because Kym’s has just been reincarnated by Wong in the Bloomberg Arcade in the City, another shiny new restaurant development with about as much atmosphere as the moon.  Victoria might never be a restaurant destination, but who needs choice when you have one modern classic?

Between finishing his anthropology degree at the LSE and taking over Kym’s from his parents, Wong travelled around China to explore the byways of regional Chinese cooking. 

The results of the chef’s culinary gap year are collected on his Taste of China menu in the likes of Chengdu street tofu, Anhui fermented seabass and Wuwei smoked duck, but unless you’ve a thing for tasting menus, my advice is to dive in to the à la carte and order all your favourite dishes.

You won’t find them done better this side of Xinjiang. Wong’s take on crispy chilli beef involves finger-sized goujons of deep-fried meat in a beautifully balanced sauce: hands down one of the best things I’ve eaten all year, the beefy succulence cut by chilli heat and sourness.

Barbecued pork belly, meanwhile, is topped with candied pork jerky, as salty-sweet as the sheets of dried meat you find on street-food stalls in Singapore. It’s a mark of Wong’s skill that the main event is sometimes outshone by its support act.

Take the intensely savoury tangle of umami-rich mung bean noodles under a pair of garlic-steamed lobster tails, or the sheer deliciousness of Cantonese honey-roasted pork that makes you forget the grated foie gras the sticky meat is meant to cling to.

Both dishes showcase spellbinding simplicity refined into the realm of the sublime. Wong even manages to make Szechuan food subtle: "1,000 chilli" chicken with snails and Sichuan pepper, and gong bao chicken with roasted peanuts, both taste like a collection of individual ingredients arranged into a harmonious whole rather than a one-note explosion of chilli. 

On and on it goes, like the most heavenly Chinese banquet: seared wagyu beef with mint, chilli and lemongrass as refreshingly fragrant as the best Vietnamese cooking; fleshy aubergine soaking up a tangy Szechuan sauce; crispy noodles slowly softening in a gravy as brown as Bisto.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that one is often not enough of dishes served in pairs for two people to share. I’d have loved a whole rack of the sweet and sour pork ribs, sticky and crisp, or a pile of the gently toasted bao buns that you daub with sesame and fill with soft strands of stringy, cumin-infused lamb.

But that’s just greed talking. And if you really hate sharing, come for dim sum at lunchtime, when each dumpling is sold individually. The dough is gathered and pleated like edible tailoring, structured and soft, and the seasoning is often added to the dumpling itself, so that har gau has prawn already coated in sweet chilli sauce, while the stock of a Shanghai steamed dumping is infused with the ginger vinegar usually served on the side for dipping. 

A recent refurbishment has left the dining room looking smarter and darker than it did before, though the layout is unchanged, with stools for solo diners and social media mavens arranged around an eating counter looking into the kitchen, and tables proper by the windows. 

But no one is at A. Wong for the design.  A meal here is interspersed with the sounds of more pleasure-filled moaning than Meg Ryan at brunch. This is Chinese cooking that is at once recognisable, but in the depth of flavours and layers of textures, feels as if these familiar dishes are being revealed for the first time.

Never mind the best restaurant in Victoria. This is possibly the best Chinese restaurant in Europe.

Who to take:The greediest person you know.  

What to order: As much as possible. There isn’t one dud dish. 

A. Wong 70 Wilton Road London SW1V 1DE

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