Made in China offers welcome feast from the East

On top of that, if budding Chinese catering entrepreneurs do exist, they are held back from bringing in skilled chefs from their homeland by ever-stricter immigration laws. Now it is demanded of incoming chefs that they have an existing command of English language up to GCSE grade C. It is more than we ask of our own.

Chinese restaurants are popular — the desire to have a Chinese meal grips me at least once a week — and perhaps that explains why the owners of the Japanese restaurant Atami in Westminster have recently relaunched it as Made in China. A restaurant of that name used to exist in Fulham Road but closed a few years ago. Maybe the chefs hadn’t been able successfully to parse an extract from Pride and Prejudice.

My husband Reg Gadney, keener even than I am on Chinese food, says that he loves parts of London that are bustling during the day but deserted at night. If you read his novels you will understand why. The corner of Great Peter Street and Monck Street adjacent to the hideous Home Office and opposite what looks like a church mission fulfils the brief admirably. Light shining from the glazed walls of Made in China makes the restaurant glow in the darkened, silent streets like an Edward Hopper painting.

Inside you might say economies have been made with the revamp or you could observe that almost nothing at all has been done to alter the only mildly attractive minimalist décor. Perched on what was the sushi bar there is now a glass box that looks like an aquarium for vegetables. Closer inspection reveals fresh fish reclining at the base.

Following a trend led most notably by Yauatcha in Soho, dim-sum are served in the evenings as well as daytime. I’m guessing, but based on the assorted steamed dumplings (£9 for eight pieces) I’d say they employ an in-house dim-sum chef. Or maybe they just know the right place to buy. The wrappings of har gau, chicken sui mai, scallop and prawn, and pork and chive dumplings were finely drawn and delicate, and the fillings bouncy.

On a second visit, xiao loong bao (Shanghai dumplings), ordered as an A-level exam in dim-sum, were less convincing, being short on spurting soup and not having the 18 pleats the dough casing should ideally sport.

There is nothing on the menu to frighten the civil servants or, indeed the table of priests who were our neighbours on the first visit. For this reason my eyes sped to the section at the end of the list of predictable dishes, which is entitled Chef Recommendations.

From here, roast black cod with Szechuan sauce delivered a fish so precisely timed that the flesh fanned out like a deck of opalescent cards, with a sauce predictably punchy but not so much so that the flavour was obliterated. Five-spiced chicken was not the sort of assembly that Gerrard Street waiters try to stop the round-eyes ordering but it did have intriguing Cantonese flavour beyond the salty/sweet/hot/sour quartet.
On both visits I also tried to order another chef special, duck with crispy yams. On the second occasion, when the waitress said the dish was unavailable, I asked, "Do you think you will ever have it?" She sighed and replied, "Maybe not". We tried instead minced pork with aubergine and salty fish, which was cooked in enough oil to save the planet.

The familiar dishes are also cooked with care and integrity, and with its reasonable prices and gentle service, Made in China has been added to my short list of places to go when I am longing for Chinese food. Towards the end of our second dinner we spied a little flurry of activity in the street. We thought it was Alan Johnson getting into a car.

Made in China
351 Fulham Road, SW10 9TW