LEONG’S LEGEND 3: NIGHTMARE ON QUEENSWAY 1

It’s been several months since I’ve been for Dim Sum. Even when HS jets in from LA (cool) we’re more likely to cook up a large lump of protein than go for steamed dumplings.

Truth be told the Dim Sum options in London are not great. We’ve long grown out of the Chinatown places that serve up identikit, bought-in stuff, that’s cheap but ultimately quite dull. Even moving up to the middle range places the quality isn’t great or that consistent. You have to trade up to the Hakkasan’s or Min Jiang’s to get stuff that’s properly i.e. freshly made.

Leong’s Legend is a Chinatown-based chain of Taiwanese restaurants that’s recently opened a new outpost in Queensway. HS visited one of the previous branches and found it sorely lacking. Since it’s now a chain one wouldn’t reasonably expect things to improve as the concept is rolled out, and as I found on my visit, they haven’t.

I’d eschewed some of the regular dim sum in favour of Taiwanese specialities and the Xiaolongbao, apparently a speciality here. I’m pretty sure I’d read on the menu somewhere that all the dishes were freshly prepared but the dough sticks that turned up first had toughness that spoke of Saturday night rather than Sunday morning.

We’ve noticed that when most of the dishes turn up at once then you’re in for a poor dim sum experience. Unfortunately, that’s what happened at Leong’s – seemingly minutes after ticking the boxes on the menu my table was filled with everything I had ordered.

The XLB – sampled first while they were hot – were very disappointing: thick skinned and lacking in enough of the soup that makes them so enjoyable to eat. Even the filling was dull. Once they’d gone cold they lost what little attraction they’d had. Crispy Shredded Turnip were oily and yawn-inducing and a Steamed Meat Ball in a fluorescent sauce very nasty indeed.

I’d overlooked the picture of Casket; which turned out to be a box made out of Fried Bread and filled with a mixture of chicken and diced veg in a gloopy white sauce. I suspect it must be a sort of guilty pleasure thing for Taiwanese everywhere because it didn’t have any obvious culinary merits although after eight pints of strong lager it might have its attractions.

At least there were a couple of dishes that did reach the heady levels of ok. A speciality of Mini Kebab with Pork was a small cube of belly in a bun. It was clumsily constructed and lacked filler but with a nice relish it didn’t taste too bad.

A sort of hamburger in a dough case wasn’t subtle but I enjoyed it as I do most pieces of meat fashioned into a burger shape.

I think the waitress really wanted me to enjoy my meal – even if the kitchen had other ideas - so I ate as much as I could and got the substantial remains bagged up, which seemed to keep her happy. Which is more than you can say for me.

Oh well, back to unfeasibly large pieces of meat stuffed in the oven.

KEELUNG: DINING WITH THE SHADOWS

Who knew that Sir Cliff and The Shadows were so big in Taiwan?

Well, if the décor of Keelung, a new Taiwanese restaurant on Lisle Street from the people who brought you Leong’s Legend, is to believed they are obviously gods. Particularly when said décor is added to the restaurants chosen soundtrack for DH’s Sunday lunch which blared tribute to the former Mr Webb’s & Co’s career from the Soho coffee shop days of “Move It” through the pomp magnificence of “Wired for Sound” and all the way up to the solo Yuletide smash that is “Mistletoe & Wine”

Mind you, if the job lot of black & white pictures which adorn the wall of Keelung are to believed the Taiwanese also dig The Rat Pack, love Louise Brookes and, most oddly of all worship at the feet of Dame Anna Neagle.

The confusion was added to as we took a booth in the darkened restaurant and were presented with a variety of menus to work our way through and an ordering form that would have made Alan Turing take pause.

Keelung offers itself up as a “Seafood Restaurant” and the first piece of paper listed all the available fruits of the sea along with the nine ways they could be cooked ranging from simple steaming to Sichuan style and even as sashimi, reflecting the influence of cooking from all over China on the island.

Added to this there is the standard menu, which offers up small plates of Taiwanese specialities under the unnecessary Esparanto of “Night Market Street Food Tapas” just in case any customer was is stupid to understand the small plate concept without reference to Spanish dining. Finally, there was one more paper sheet upon which you were asked to mark your order and which listed some but not all of the dishes from the previous two menus.

After about ten minutes our collective ninety five years of life experience had just allowed us to figure out an ordering strategy and, while making a token nod to reason the restaurant exists, DH were more attracted by the offer of pig and its innards in various forms than fish or seafood.

The dishes arrived rapidly and in no discernable order and soon the table for four was covered with the opening salvo of stir-fried Morning Glory, gua bao, a Taiwanese take on the hamburger and three light flaky puffs with a curry filling. The puffs stood out, piping hot and crumbling nicely on the tongue to reveal gently spiced contents, although I again had to wonder if the menu use of the word “samosa” has some origin in ancient trading routes or was another nod towards the expected stupidity of diners?

Braised belly pork with rice could have been a contender but if the meat had not been dry as a bone, but the pig factor was saved by the appearance of a bowl of boneless trotters also braised in soy and rice wine, which were rich and fatty falling apart as we tried to move them from bowl to plate.

Given our love of meat the fact that the star dish of the day was a plate of crisp bean curd cubes in a sharp plum sauce with a heaping helping of deep-fried garlic should tell you just how good it was, better even than a plate of four meaty prawns served Sichuan style in a tell tale slick of chilli infused oil. We had asked for the dish to be cooked “Kung Pao” style, also from Sichuan but, whether through our confusion or that of the kitchen, peanuts were noticeable by their absence although the excellent prawns themselves were soon being eaten, shell and all, with the heads sucked dry before being discarded.

A final dish of sixteen Xia Long Bao, including a special with crab meat, were a step too far away from Taiwan and not very good at all. Suitably soupy with a good broth, the dough was tough and scarcely worth the effort it took to break through and in the end the final handful were left in the steaming basket with neither of us showing any enthusiasm for completing the job.

Keelung has a large wine list and a range of that rather nasty bubble tea that was all the rage a few years ago, but we stuck to tea and with an added service charge our bill came to £52, about the same as a typical DH Sunday afternoon sortie for Dim Sum and enough to convince that it may just be worth another visit to spend more time exploring the list of seafood and Taiwanese specialities.

As long as they promise to buy another CD. Sorry Cliff.

HERMANO SEGUNDO BACK IN LA: THAI TOWN AND TAIWANESE PORK CHOPS

Los Angeles is made of cities.

There are the ritzy ones like Santa Monica, Bel Air and Beverly Hills. There are the tougher neighbourhoods like Compton, Watts and East L.A and there are those in between like Culver City where I am staying on this trip.

If geographically and politically, L.A is made up of cities, then in a culinary sense, L.A is made up of towns, each representing a different part of its vast and varied demographic. There’s K-Town, where on my last visit I had some of the best Korean BBQ I have ever tried. There’s Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Historic Filipino Town and, best of all, Thai Town, which I am told, is the centre for the largest concentration of Thai’s outside of Thailand itself.

For lunch yesterday Sybil had selected Jitlada, a small but well thought of restaurant in the heart of Thai town and although it was quiet and empty when we arrived the restaurant soon began to fill with both hungry punters and alluring smells from the kitchen.

We were only planning a light lunch, so began with Yum Pla Duk Foo, a salad of slightly sour mango with deep fried catfish, where the fish is baked and shredded into tiny flakes before being fried until wonderfully crisp.

To follow, two more traditional Southern Thai dishes, a fiery yellow curry with pork and a “Bangkok style” fried rice topped with egg and served with flavourings of spring onions, shallots, cucumber and pork in a sweet sauce. Both were excellent with sharp, fresh flavours of fresh preparation and good ingredients and at $20a head, a perfect budget lunch.

We could easily have ordered and enjoyed more dishes, but for supper, Sybil wanted to show me yet another side to L.A and, after an afternoon of walking up to the splendid Griffith Park Observatory, we bundled up at the door of her good friend, Doris who had persuaded her mother to cook us a Traditional Taiwanese supper.

I was fading a bit by then and the thought of my bed could have won out had it not been for the delicious savoury steam emanating from the kitchen. Soon, with a restorative glass of wine to keep me going, I watched Doris’s mum appear with our meal, which consisted of “Lion’s Head Soup” with toothsome pork meatballs, mushrooms and cabbage and a pork chop fried and served with fresh and pickled cabbage.

Both Doris and her Mum were slightly apologetic explaining that Taiwanese food is often “not very pretty food” but no apologies were necessary. As I mentioned in my last post, taste wins out over appearance every time and both these dishes were deeply delicious. Sybil seemed to agree as she gnawed at the bone of her pork chop and drained the last drops from her soup bowl.

I have said it before and I will say it again it is food like this that makes me truly happy, simple, well prepared and served with generosity of spirit. L.A may be made up of cities, but its towns are coming up trumps

LEONG'S LEGEND: A MYTH NOT A HIT

There is an ancient Chinese legend, which tells of two weary travellers who, after a long journey, find themselves in the heart of a big city. Famished from their journey, they approach a cheery tavern where they are quickly seated in the warmth and presented with hearty dishes to assuage their hunger as the friendly inn owner and his wife bustle about making sure that they and all the other guests receive perfect hospitality.

Their food is spectacular. A soup made with noodles and beef tendon warms them to the soul, small dumplings threaten to burst so filled are they with savoury broth and little nuggets of chicken crackle with the sound of recent frying.

It is everything they could have dreamed of. It is the stuff of legend and, sipping on restorative tea they close their eyes to savour the moment.

Er, and then they wake up and find that they are in fact two impoverished food writers seated in a draughty corner of yet another restaurant in Chinatown, which promises to deliver something different but fails. The service is perfunctory and the food, cheap though it is, still doesn’t feel like the real thing.

Leong’s Legend (you knew there had to be a point to the beginning of our tale, didn’t you?) is one of those places that crop up in Chinatown every now and again and get peoples' undergarments all in a knot.

“Squeal, it’s the real thing. Squeal” You know the drill.

They are of course no such thing and although, like Bar Shu, they have some aspects the purists can cling onto, the economic factors of their location and therefore their clientele ensure that they are never going to take too many risks or be too (dreaded “A” word alert) authentic.

LL has been around a while now and had people raving about its interpretation of Taiwanese food and its soup filled dumplings but, even on a brief and cheap lunchtime excursion and even to our palates, untutored to this island’s cooking, the dishes all seemed listless, neutered and lacking in taste.

While the beef tendon in a “spicy” soup was pleasingly fatty and soft, the noodles were pre-cooked to mush and the broth lacked any discernable flavour at all. Likewise fried chicken, where the small pieces of bird had toughened up to little rocks as if they had just been refried from the previous night's service.

The much vaunted siu long bao, dumplings filled with soup, are originally from Shanghai but taken to excellence by many Taiwanese places, as I found at Din Tai Fun in L.A. The elastic pastry of the best examples bulges ominously as you pick them up but never bursts giving you the pleasure of biting a hole and slurping out the contents. Here, the juice was already leaking over the steamer and the wet dumplings had already attached themselves to the base, which meant that any residual liquid was lost as we struggled to pick them up. The meaty contents were well seasoned and a final dish of braised belly pork with rice, was perfectly fine , but like the rest of meal, all far too polite to cause a raised eyebrow.

Our bill of £24 including service charge was low enough not to depress us too much but did add to our conviction that all this talk of a new beginning in Chinatown is, like the beginning of this post, a bit of a myth.