Grace Dent reviews Xu: both important and disappointing
Ambience: 5/5
Food: 3/5
A few of the 200 or so restaurants that plop annually on to London’s landscape arrive fully pre-imbued with hotness.
They ping to life festooned with praise, laden with influencer-driven merry piffle, often before the stoves have been fitted. Xu, a Taiwanese 1930s-style restaurant/teahouse on Rupert Street, is such an arrival. I could explain how buzz starts buzzing — the culprits involved, the phrases that pay and so on — but I’d need at least three hours, an A2 flip chart, several Sharpies, an intense spider diagram and 5g of Valium afterwards just to take the edge off.
Suffice to say, the thing you need to know for now is, Xu is pronounced ‘sheuuuu’. Not zoo. Not Sue. Pronounce it in a manner that suggests it’s utterly commonplace to pop in for tiny lunchtime foie gras terrine ‘gold coins’ embossed with a layer of Shaoxing wine jelly, a terrine of wobbly, glistening, numbing beef tendon.
‘Hang on,’ you’re thinking. ‘Isn’t this a restaurant by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung? The lovely Bao people who serve those nice, fluffy buns that foodland filled up Instagram with for months, bellowing “Get in my mouth” and “This just happened. Nommity nom nom?”’ Yes, the same folk. But Xu is fresh ground. It’s backwards-looking progress. The buns are gone, the gloves are off.
Xu is a rather gorgeous, slightly peculiar, cramped yet characterful, wood-panelled, Wes Anderson-style reinterpretation of yesteryear Taipei. Tea is available, but the cocktails are serious. Try a Daiga, a tiny, fearsome, delicious sipping glass of amontillado sherry, cognac, Chinese mushroom and liquorice root. I guarantee the world will feel better within two tiny mouthfuls. ‘Xu was a free spirited, charismatic gentleman, a journalist,’ a footnote on the single sheet papery throwaway menu reads, describing Erchen Chang’s grandfather. Xu even has Mahjong rooms for hire. It’s not often a restaurant inspires you to take up a hobby, but then almost everything about Xu makes my heart thump at its chutzpah. The set-up is undoubtedly a huge labour of love for the owners. Insulting it would feel like slapping their faces. On the lunchtime I ate there, the place rocked with foodie-types, families, super-aloof music industry sorts and even Alan Yau of Park Chinois and Hakkasan pedigree.
At this juncture I should say I wish I’d loved the food more than I did. I adored the peanut lotus crisps in slightly damp chilli peanut powder and a winter melon syrup. The foie gras ‘gold coin’ was a slightly soggy, somewhat underwhelming affair. More of a test than a treat. Three rather chewy Taiwanese sausage taro dumplings arrived in a puddle of green kow choi chilli dressing. I ate one and donated the others to my companion. The numbing tendon terrine was certainly hot and numbing, but not to my taste wholly enjoyable. It was here I started to fret that perhaps our meal more broadly was not going to be ‘to my taste’, but instead to the taste of someone who hankers for their grilled seabass fillet to come covered entirely in a two-tone red and green pickled chilli, sitting in a pool of bone sauce and grilled bone vinegar. The dish was pretty but wet without much texture. A bowl of kale and lap yuk (soy cured pork) was inoffensive. Lardo and lard onion rice was neither decadent nor massively memorable. The ma lai warm sponge cake is a simple steamed brown sugar affair, which arrived with condensed milk and orange butterscotch sauce.
Xu is both one of the most important openings of 2017 and at the same time disappointing. That’s the London food scene for you. I never said anything was straightforward.
Xu
1 Beef tendon £5.50
2 Gold coins £5.50
1 Lotus crisps £2
2 Fried chicken wing £6
1 Taro dumpling £5.50
1 Seabass £16.50
1 Kale lap yuk £5.50
1 Lard rice £3.50
1 Ma lai cake £6.50
2 Glasses of Peter Lauer £16
1 Diaga £9
1 Tamshui £11
Total £92.50
30 Rupert Street, Soho, W1 (xulondon.com)