The dishes may sound baffling, but luckily Yipin China also uses pictures of its searingly delicious food on the menu70-72 Liverpool Road, London N1 (020 7354 3388). Meal for two, including drinks and service, �65There are rules. We know what they are. Never eat in a restaurant on a boat. The management will assume you are so thrilled by the whole floaty-boaty thing that the food will be an afterthought. Never eat in a revolving restaurant. The same applies. And never eat in a restaurant where the menu has pictures. They are aimed at mouth-breathers who find those pesky words a little too complicated. You can guarantee that a restaurant pitched at the very lowest common denominator will never feed you well.The one exception is the growing number of Sichuan and Hunanese restaurants popping up around Britain, where the picture-led menu is a part of the deal. Here, it's helpful. Sure, there is something mellifluous and soothing about the found poetry of pock-marked old woman's bean curd, spicy pig's intestines, or fragrant chicken in a pile of chillies, but sometimes you need visuals to help you work out whether they mean it. And yes, at Yipin China they really do mean it. When they say pile of chillies there are piles of chillies.To be honest you could stare at the menu here for hours. It is the best art-directed, most lusciously photographed example I've ever seen. The restaurant itself, located on a blunt stretch of road in Islington, may be utilitarian and simple: wood floors, white walls, bright lights. The menu, by contrast, is all Oscar-night glamour. The reds are very red, the chilli oils very shiny, the pig's intestines the very essence of inner wobbly animal bits.You will quickly have worked out that Yipin China is not for everybody. No, madam, it is not for you. And you, sir, stop scowling. Just accept you won't like it. It is for me, though, because I like being beaten around the head with funky, unapologetic, chilli-tastic offal-led food. After all, if you're going to bang an animal on the head you have a responsibility to eat everything, including its guts. Ideally dressed with buckets of chillies. Still, I can well imagine lots of other people ? or wimps, as I call them ? running away from the food here blubbering to their mummies about how their dinner is trying to hurt them. They would be missing out.The chef, Mingyuan Deng, used to be at Golden Day on Shaftesbury Avenue, and I remember fondly his dry-wok dishes, cooking down over a guttering flame until all the flavours had intensified to something approaching DEFCON 1. Here, the menu is divided between Hunanese, Sichuanese and Cantonese dishes, and it was only one of the latter that disappointed: a meagre portion of lamb chops in an over-sweetened sauce. There was a bit of bone nibblage which is never to be sneered at, but it was a letdown given the lick-the-page gastro porn of the picture. Far better was a plate of slippery, crunchy black ear fungus dressed with lots of chilli and sesame oil. It felt cleansing. Another starter of five-spiced smoked fish, served cold, was an assault course on account of the bones ? in the old days you'd have spat them out on to the saw-dusted floor ? but was worth it for the hit of smoke and five spice. A huge plate of sliced, fried beef with cumin and chilli and cumin and chilli and chilli and salt, was the sort of thing you want to bury yourself in. Ditto, sliced bean curd, fried off with thinly sliced pork and fresh red chillies. Rather a lot of them. It made my scalp sweat. In a good way. To mop all that up we had a pile of utterly compelling fried rice with salted chillies, which was a lovely shade of pink.At the end we tried pumpkin cakes, the discs of lightly sweetened pumpkin-rich batter deep fried until they puffed up like souffl� potatoes. When you bit into them you got crunch and crisp and puffs of hot, sweet air. I would return just for these. And while I was there I'd have a go at the dry-wok squid and the boiled fish with sizzling chilli oil. And, of course, the famed Chairman Mao's red-braised pork, its jellified skin the colour of an old lacquered screen. Those of you who are serious about their food will love it. At the very least go online and have a look at the pictures. It's the kind of visual filth for which the web was invented.Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one placeFood & drinkChinese food and drinkRestaurantsRestaurantsJay Raynerguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
No comments:
Post a Comment