Central London - Fitzrovia - 三峡人家 (SanXia RenJia)

I have a weird obsession with Chinese food. I'm not sure where or why it started but I have some form of pork, noodles and/or rice at least twice a week.  Because, I love it so much, I'm very particular on how it's taste. Some people love the Chinese food in London's Chinatown, but I always feel like I'm eating something cooked in dirty bath water! I tend to prefer the shops that are a bit outside of Central, but I have been surprised before.

My office is on Tottenham Court Road, in the heart of tourist trap London so we have our fill of fast food and chain restaurants in the area. If you head a bit North, to Fitzrovia, Goodge Street pours over with smaller establishments and a variety of flavours.  As Chinatown is quite close to my office, I wasn't too keen on trying any of the places nearby - assuming they would taste like Chinatown restaurangs. One day I finally made the leap!

There are two Chinese restaurants on Goodge Street: one that has a buffet and where everything is written in Chinese characters. I went for the one that was written, 三峡人家 (San Xia Ren Jia). My little bit of Mandarin told me that said, '3', 'something about a mountain', 'a person' and I didn't know the last character. (Google translate says '3 gorges? wtf!?)

Inside, it tends to be a relaxed atmosphere.  There are large, circular tables, great for sharing dishes when you're in a big group. The rest of the building is an open plan, so it's not a very intimate setting for those looking for a quiet date.  The menu is about a million pages long.  I've read it a few times and I still dont see my standard Pork Chow Mein on the list. No worries, I ordered it anyhow and it was still prepared.

As I was on my lunch break, I was in a bit of a rush (I don't have actual lunch breaks, I work straight through them most of the time).  It took about 10 minutes, but that was an acceptable wait.  The food tasted exactly how I wanted so it passes my Can You Make Pork Dishes? test. My only problem was that for £5.50 it was a fairly small serving. I get a delivery from Crouch End that can feed me for three days on £5.50!

San Xia Ren Jia does offer student discounts and special menus during lunch, so perhaps it finds its value in portions with those special offers.  It is also a Karaoke Bar and from it's menu, it proclaims to have bubble tea! We all know how much I love bubble tea. :) They weren't offering it when I went there so I'm not sure if that's still true. Their style of cooking is self-described as 'Authentic Szechuan, Cantonese & Hunan Cuisine'.

As there is a lack of Chinese restaurants that I like in Central, I have and will continue to go there. I just hope I can get some bubble tea soon, and maybe about 33% more food in my takeaway box!

SanXia RenJia can be found at:

29 Goodge Street
London
W1T 2PP
Nearest Tube: Goodge Street

www.sanxia.co.uk

Central London - Secret LDN - Soho - Gallery Rendezvous

Wow this one has been sitting in the Drafts folder for some time now!  Delayed but still worthy, here's my review of an unexpected night in Soho.

I love finding new places that take you by surprise.  It seems that this month I've been rediscovering all the things I used to do on a regular basis at home and finally doing them again in London (re: Bubble Tea).

On a night out after work, someone in our group mentioned a karaoke place in Soho. This was definitely something out of the ordinary for most of us as the pub that's about 5 steps away from our office doors is our normal setting.  Nonetheless, we weaved through the damp, narrow streets of Soho after deciding a dance club was not on the cards for the night and finally stopped in front of a standard Chinese restaurant. (?)  This took us by surprise for two reasons 1) we weren't in Chinatown which isn't far from Soho, yet made this place stick out like a sore thumb amidst the other bars and 2) there was no one in the restaurant. OK, I lied a little bit, there were two girls in the restaurant but that was it!  As our group consisted of a very loud batch of 10+ media types we definitely felt like we were in the wrong place.

The name of the restaurant: Gallery Rendezvous. Not exactly what you would expect a Chinese restaurant to be named, maybe they're really Vietnamese but we'll roll with it. When you walked in, although it was as empty as the alleys it bordered, you felt like you were being invited into someone's home.  The man, possibly the owner, serving the tables saw the size of our group and offered us, pretty much a grand buffet of food for a £10 each.  It was like we had our own private party and catering team.

I've come to realise that I have two favourite cuisines; Italian and Chinese...but I'm very specific about my Chinese food.  I know American-Chinese isn't as authentic but it is amazingly delicious and anything that comes close to it is a win in my books.  In fact I don't like many of the restaurants in Chinatown at all, I prefer the ones outside of Central.  As we were so close to Chinatown I was pretty worried about their cooking methods.  The fact that this man offered us so much food for a flat rate had me worried, but it was everything I could have wanted!  A friend from Taiwan once gave me the advice:

"If you want to know how well a Chinese restaurant can cook, order their pork dishes. If they can't cook pork, you don't want to eat there."

And pork there was a-plenty! We ordered our food, asked for as many pork dishes as possible and after about 10 minutes we were escorted out of the restaurant for our karaoke session.

Neon light in Gallery Rendezvous Karaoke room

You would not have known that there was an entire 2 floors dedicated to karaoke rooms in the Gallery Rendezvous.  You would probably hear it, as not many people are there eating, but if you saw it you may have thought you stepped into the TARDIS.  We walked to the top floor into a large rectangular room which had been arranged with L-shaped sofas along blank walls soaked in blue neon lights.  The "Karaoke Machine", was a PC tower from circa 1998, wired to a large flat screen TV.  To choose your karaoke songs, you had to scroll through the selection of downloaded karaoke music on the PC and put them in a playlist on, you ready for this?....WINAMP!

We must have gone for a ride in the TARDIS because it looked like something straight out of a college dorm (university halls) during the Y2K crisis. Not only was the setup shoddy, so were the videos/songs. Missing tracks, mild porn videos for songs that didn't match, a YouTube photo slide of Beyonce for Halo - I mean it could have at least been a photo slide of a heavenly sky, no?  The rooms went for £30/hour, but as we were a large group it was a small amount to pay for a very entertaining night.  Luckily the singing happened quite late in the evening and we were all in a right state, so the mishaps brought more laughter than annoyance. 

Overall, I had a great time.  The singing, although loud and sometimes painful, really had the whole room in a great mood.  I may come back for another karaoke night if in the right state of mind.  The food however, was perfect and it was a shame we didn't snatch up some takeaway boxes because there was so much food left over by the time our 3 hour karaoke session finished.  

Come back for the food, stay for the entertainment.

I actually haven't had Chinese food since this night and that was about three weeks ago.  I'm still trying to find my new favourite Chinese restaurant in the N19...  *logs in to hungryhouse and looks up a decent takeaway*

Gallery Rendezvous can be found at:

53-55 Beak Street

London

W1F 9SH

Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus or Piccadilly Circus

galleryrendezvous.pixelsurgeon.com/index.html

Asian Persuasion

Hands down, next to all the fantastic people I've met through life and travel, meeting their cuisine is the next best part.  Over the past year, I shared a kitchen with 2 Japanese, 2 Cubans, 1 Chinese, 1 Greek and 1 Ukrainian - their cooking styles will stay with me for years to come.  I like to take bits and pieces of different recipes that I like and put them in one dish as I did tonight.  This dish was practically done in a hobo style, that is, I just took random things I had and threw it together - but some of the greatest meals started that way, no?


One of my all time favourite dishes is chicken adobo, a Filipino dish that was cooked for me while I was living in Australia.  I wasn't going to go all out on the adobo, but I still had those drumsticks from before.  I really have a thing for vinegar for some reason, but that's one of the most familiar flavours/smells of this dish.  So I whipped out my white vinegar, and soy sauce, turned a frying pan on high heat with some vegetable oil and threw in the drumsticks.  A bit of salt and pepper, naturally, for taste.  When the drumsticks were nearly done I poured out the excess oil and covered them in the vinegar and put it back on the heat.  But wait, I need rice! 


Here are a few cool tips learned from my former kitchen mates: Put extra cooked rice in the freezer, and when you need it later, use it.  More importantly, if you're making a dish that requires fried rice old rice is better than freshly cooked rice!  So, when I ordered a Chinese takeout earlier last week and I didn't finish my white rice, I popped that in the freezer.  Zapped that in the microwave today for about 2 minutes and then added it to my vinegar chicken fry-up situation.  Now I've got fried rice, which I added about 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce in the pan to get those fried rice characteristics.


One thing that the English grocery stores do well is help with pre-selected, single-serving veggies.  I feel a bit bad buying a bag of mixed vegetables when I could just as easily buy each of the ingredients and mix it together myself, for probably cheaper (if you think in bulk).  But in reality, a lot of people do house/flat shares here - I don't have all the space in the world in my fridge.  So I picked up a bag of what was considered "Mushroom stir-fry vegetables" including cabbage, carrots, mung beans, red onions and mushrooms and threw that in to the pan as well.  


Semi-chicken adobo, fried rice and mushroom stir-fry vegetables in the pan and sizzling away.  To me, no dish is complete without garlic.  Literally, I could eat a whole clove, I love garlic that much.  I didn't this time, I finely chopped some garlic and sat it to the side.  One root that has grown on me is ginger, which one of my housemates used a lot for her dishes.  To be honest, ginger practically made this dish, and almost gave it a Thai taste with the tangy-ness from the vinegar. I chopped it, zested it, diced it - there was a lot of 'it' in there.  Also I had some spring onions left over from many many dishes ago (I made a mexican layered chili dip - which unfortunately I haven't documented on here as of yet) and I chopped those and added it to the mix. 


Last but not least - an egg.  In my opinion any asian dish is made awesome-er when an egg is involved. I made an open spot on the pan, cracked an egg there, and scrambled it in the same spot before stirring it into the other ingredients.


At the end I threw in a quick dash of this "Chinese 5 spice" BS that I've never heard of before.  My current housemates had some in the drawer, but I have a bit of a hate for store-bought and packaged spices that are a mix of spices that you can put together yourself. Italian seasoning, Emeril's Essence, even All-spice, I have all those things lying around anyhow, I'm not gonna buy a specific container that you so conveniently mixed for me! Argh!  Anyhow, this 5 spice really overpowers with the anise, so I didn't want much of it - but if you like liquorice scents, add more.


So there we go, left over rice, left over onions, some drumsticks, garlic, ginger, and pre-packaged stir-fry veggies.  Quick cook, cost about a fiver, and delicious.