London,

Ba Shan

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Cuisine: Oriental
A meal for two with wine, about £70 inc 12.5 per cent service.

24 Romilly Street, W1D 5AH

Nearest Tube: Leicester Square

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Phone: 020 7434 2234

Open: Open daily noon-11.30pm.

 

 

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Ba Shan celebrates small eats

 

Flour power: chef Wei Guirong making noodles at Ba Shan

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There is an advertisement for some bank or other (who cares which one) shown at the movies where the plot, if it can be called that, is the visiting bank executive’s necessary understanding of the local customs of far-flung places. At the newly opened Ba Shan in Romilly Street the hero of this ad would not have done as I did and ask why the restaurant diagonally opposite called Bar Shu (in the same ownership) was closed. The waitress looked at the floor. I stumbled on. “Am I right in thinking there was a fire?” She continued to look at the floor but also sideways. “Was it a problem with the extraction?” She quietly left our side.

Questions such as these are not the sort the Chinese like. I fell into the trap again when the same waitress asked if we liked the fish-fragrant broad beans. Stupidly candid, I replied: “They are not quite as good as when we ate here on Wednesday.” “They are good?” she offered hopefully. “Yes,” I meekly replied but then, unable to resist, I added “but they were even better on Wednesday.”

Ba Shan is the newest venture from Shao Wei, owner of the Sichuan restaurant Bar Shu (indeed closed by a fire but due to re-open at the end of May), who employs Fuchsia Dunlop as interpreter between East and West in the presentation of concept and menu. Fuchsia graduated from the Culinary Institute in Cheng-du, the first Westerner to do such a thing, and is an authority on Sichuan cooking, as her innovative book Sichuan Cookery (Penguin, £14.99) attests.

At Ba Shan, which roughly translates as “little Chinese town”, the aim is to celebrate the wealth of xiao chi (“small eats”) within Chinese regional cooking. In what was the late, lamented by me, La Capannina where Linda and Gianni Frattini did more to reveal authentic Italian cooking than some who get the credit, the new layout of small, dark- painted rooms glowingly lit and decorated with carvings, filigree bird cages, silk-sealed ceramic storage jars, bamboos and dangling lanterns invokes the spirit and bustle of Chinese village life.

One room is decorated with theatrical silhouette puppets, another with strings of plastic vegetables to suggest the marketplace, but it is done with restraint. Bare wooden stools do not encourage lingering and at one point we folded up our coats and sat on them, as there is so much to explore and enjoy in the food.

The wide range of dishes includes salads, Sichuan flatbread sandwiches (jia mo), steamed lotus-leaf buns, wontons (chaoshou), dumplings, Xi’an pot stickers (guotie), noodles in soup, dry noodles, fried rice and vegetable assemblies. On the first visit I asked one of the staff whom I had met before at Bar Shu to make choices for four of us. The second time we plotted our own route.

Sichuan pepper adds its interesting lip-numbing effect to familiar nibbles (as they put it) such as edamame beans and roasted peanuts. Preserved Asian radish with sesame oil is another nibble worth trying. It has a sort of creaky texture.

Salads of spicy chicken or five- spiced beef or pressed beancurd and celery are all excellent, but for the visual delight particularly, go for good-luck egg roll with chicken and laver seaweed. Those fish-fragrant broad beans the first time round were crisply coated and soft within. The second time I think they had been sitting too long in their dressing and had lost the agreeable contrast of texture.

But forget quibbles with the nibbles — my advice is to try at least one representative from each list which, at prices ranging from £2.80 to £6.80, is feasible financially. We especially liked jia mo with cumin-spiced beef; lotus leaf buns with tender stewed pork; prawn and water chestnut dumpling with spicy, garlicky sauce; chicken and shiitake mushroom guotie; and the vegetable dishes of stir-fried water spinach with chilli and Sichuan pepper and red-braised aubergines.

Ba Shan is a charming little world apart in the middle of Soho. Suitably archaic, perhaps, but not so charming was, both times, the request for cash as the credit card machine had not arrived. Check for state of play or be prepared.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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