Sitting in Xu’s narrow, dark-panelled interior, I fancy myself not in slightly grubby lower Rupert Street – not quite Soho, not quite Chinatown – but the waiting room of a 30s train station, back when women wore ruby lips and cigarettes didn’t kill you. It’s hard to believe that outside is all tourists trying to find Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! rather than the tropics. In here, booths are upholstered in Ladurée macaron colours and ceiling fans circle languidly; from a private room comes the clack of mahjong tiles and a “tea master” opens and closes many drawers containing perfumed teas: oolongs, pu-erhs and assams. Xu has a dreamlike quality.
The food, though, is emphatically of today. The people behind the wildly successful Bao – sister and brother Wai Ting Chung and Shing Tat Chung, and Shing’s wife, Erchen Chang – have crafted a menu as distinctive as our surroundings: nominally Taiwanese, but peppered with Cantonese accents and the trio’s typically thoughtful, creative touches. Early controversial dishes (the much-maligned chickens’ feet) have been ditched, and now even seemingly throwaway elements thrill: jerkies (bak kwa) of pork, beef and lamb come, like intensely meaty After Eights, in waxed paper wraps and a rectangular wooden box, to be furled around pickled ginger, fresh mint relish or smoky pepper sauce, each a leathery little pleasure.
From the xiao tsai (bar snacks) section, we have sweetbread – marshmallowy essence of lamb, the crisp exterior wilting into a powerful puddle of fermented greens – and translucent beef tendon with oodles of minced coriander and garlic, lively with the lip-numbing tingle of Sichuan peppercorns. From mian shi (wheat-based small dishes), a hollowed-out marrowbone filled with slow-cooked, aged shortrib, sticky with its marrow, to be wrapped in Peking-duck-style pancakes with chilli-pickled daikon, shredded spring onion and stout batons of cucumber. Good Peking duck is one of my desert island dishes; this looks set to boot it into the sea. I’m also obsessing over xian bing – small round “pancakes” stuffed with minced pork and fried until golden, furiously spurting a broth aromatic with ginger, sesame oil and chives – to the extent that I search videos of people making them, watching with jaw slack, pupils dilated with lust.
But the star of the show is what they call shou pa chicken, seemingly a variant of Hainanese chicken rice or Thai khao man gai, without the rice. They had intended to serve this whole, complete with head for ripping apart by hand, but, er, chickened out – or realised that customers might – so serve it cut into succulent, star-anise-scented chunks of breast and crisp shards of thigh, the whole thing luscious with the bird’s “dripping”. Minced ginger and spring onion is scattered on top, then, at the last minute, crisp crumbs of peppery chicken skin, so it retains its crunch. Honestly: swoon. Char siu pork is also reinvented, a medium-rare Ibérico collar steak glazed with hoisin, soy and sesame on fat batons of “cucumber hearts”. I would have loved this to death if it hadn’t come with the chicken; beside that beauty, the pig is a bit of a wallflower.
We’re awash with rare ingredients: peppercorns from Yunnan, aged white soy and Chishang (“Chi Shiang” on the menu) rice, prized as Taiwan’s finest. They make their own tofu. I’ve no idea where that chicken is from, but it tastes as if it lived the happiest of lives. Rice is swollen with opulent fats: Ibérico pork lard or the almost cheesy funk of aged beef. There’s a devotion to that curious texture the Taiwanese call Q, or QQ, an alluring, gummy chewiness (think mochi, bubble tea or stiff gnocchi): springy taro dumplings, the gooey interior of that fried pork pancake, the gelatinous bounce of the tendon.
Nothing is haphazard or left to chance. Our wonderful waiter, Matt, dressed in pristine, buttoned white, is the dream steward of a fictional Pullman train. The pal, one of the world’s great chefs (uh-huh) is equally impressed. Food presentation is exquisite: beautiful crockery and bowls; a Cantonese-style ma lai cake comes fused into a decorative bamboo steamer with weeny jugs of condensed milk and orange butterscotch, slurped up greedily by the airy sponge. With Xu, the Bao trio have progressed from queues and buns and matured into restaurateurs of gravitas, wit and style. This is a serious coming of age: Xu is, quite simply, gorgeous.
• Xu 30 Rupert Street, London W1, 020-3319 8147. Open Mon-Thurs, noon-3pm, 5-11pm, Fri & Sat noon-11pm. About £35 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 9/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 8/10
