Matthew Bayley reviews Xu, London: 'A couple of tweaks away from being truly excellent'

I admit it: middle age is killing me. I entered my 40s as a glass-half-full, cheerfully optimistic, always-looking-on-the-bright-side kind of guy. Now, just two years on, I find I’ve turned into Victor Meldrew.

And it’s not the big things making me angry – our chaotic politics; the terror threat; Tottenham’s inability to win at Wembley. No it’s Love Island; Radio 1; Spotify. Modern life is not quite rubbish. But it is doing my head in. 

A few weeks ago, I bad-temperedly declared that the internet – with all of its miracles – has done absolutely nothing to improve my life: it’s just made me volcanically impatient.

A recent frustration of mine (and many other people’s, as far as I can tell) is the spread of restaurants where you can’t make a reservation. How, I have often moaned, can you just knock off and stand for an hour in a queue at 5.30pm with a bunch of hipsters if you have a real job?

As a consequence, I’ve missed out on a whole load of places at which I’d really like to eat. Take Bao, for example. I’ve looked on with longing as review after review has raved about this exquisite Taiwanese street-food place. But because it operates a restricted reservations policy, I’ve never bothered to go.

So when the Bao team opened a restaurant where you can actually, you know, get a booking, I was on to their online-reservation system (I know, I know) more swiftly than Theresa May regretted her snap election.

According to its press release, this Soho restaurant, Xu, sets out to evoke '1930s cinematic Taipei’. (Nope, me neither).

But I can say it is beautiful: art-deco curves, grooved dark-wood panelling, ceiling fans, and green and pink leather banquettes.  The shortish menu is divided into small sharing plates, mains, vegetable sides and rice.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only grumbling middle-aged man at the meal. I was eating with a friend who is currently going to cooking school, which appears mostly to involve making choux pastry and being told to throw his omelette in the bin because he’s cooked it for 25 seconds too long. And now he has his big chef’s hat on, he’s developed a theory about what makes for a good dinner out.

In his mind, the best menus are like albums – they’ve been compiled very specifically as a complete experience.  A chef’s skill is in creating dishes that complement each other.

Like listening to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, say, rather than a more random iPod Shuffle sort of approach. Xu’s menu looked a bit haphazard, my friend sniffed.

But, monologue over, he self-sacrificingly put his objections aside and helped me trough my way through a good deal of what was on offer. We began with bak kwa, the Taiwanese equivalent of jerky. What arrived were neatly presented After Eight-sized slices of cumin-cured lamb, sweet BBQ pork and chilli beef.

Loaded with mint and shallot dressing, pickled ginger and spicy mayonnaise, they were deeply flavoured, warm and savoury. My only quibble was with the mayo, which was so punchy I was still feeling the afterburn an hour later.

Best of the small plates was cuttlefish toast. Imagine the world’s greatest prawn toast: fresh, inky black and deeply salty, the whipped cod roe was a smooth intensifier of flavour. Tomato and smoked eel was vibrant and gorgeous: tiny shards of almost crispy eel hidden among sweet tomato pieces, it had us spooning the leftover juices out of the bowl.

Alongside, the XO Carabinero prawn was huge, sluiced in dark sauce. Advised to suck the meat out of the head, by the end we left the dish a hot, sweet mess of shell on a plate. Least interesting of our sharing plates was 'numbing’ beef tendon, which came in a pretty arrangement of translucent slices dressed with more chilli and Sichuan pepper. Unfortunately, the taste was negligible – mostly heat – and the texture too slippery.

From the mains, char siu Iberico pork, with leeks and sesame, was a great hunk of juicy, darkly burnished meat, which made for a fantastic, glossy mouthful of sweet and savoury. Yet our other main fell sadly short.

It seems extraordinary that any dish containing brown crabmeat could taste so little of its primary ingredient. But the egg-drop crab was, frankly, just chilli in a shell. Not insanely hot, just so dominant that the crustacean was rendered redundant. A shame, because Asian crab dishes are ordinarily a delight.

I’d like to tell you about the desserts. Except there weren’t any. The waiter explained that the kitchen is three floors below the restaurant, and they haven’t been able to figure out how  to get puddings up to diners in a state they are happy with. This seemed pretty odd. But that was that.

We paid the bill and toddled off, wanting maybe just a little more. But – for once – I wasn’t grumbling. Xu is a couple of tweaks – and a pudding menu – away from being truly excellent. Maybe even worth queueing for.