For years I had dreamed of opening a Sichuanese restaurant in London. Long periods of research in China had shown me the thrilling diversity of Chinese cuisines and my job as a reviewer of Chinese restaurants in London had made me wonder why Sichuanese was so poorly represented in this most cosmopolitan of cities. In particular, it seemed extraordinary that Londoners, with their love of spicy Thai and Indian food, were not able to sample the fiery and many-layered flavours of Sichuan Province.
So when I received, out of the blue, an e-mail from a Chinese businessman who was setting up a Sichuanese restaurant in Soho, I responded immediately. Shao Wei knew about my book, Sichuan Cookery, and had got my contacts from a friend in the coin department of the British Museum. We met for a coffee in Soho in late September last year and immediately clicked.
Shao Wei is an antiques dealer and keen amateur musician from Shandong Province who has lived in the UK for 11 years, but still travels regularly to China. He too felt that London was ready for a seriously good restaurant that would give people a taste of modern, cosmopolitan Chinese dining. In the past, the London Chinese restaurant scene has been dominated by Cantonese food, brought over by immigrants from Hong Kong. Some of it, especially the dim sum served by the Royal China chain, is excellent but it still represents only one regional style of one of the world's most diverse culinary nations. Recent years have seen a growing number of Chinese mainlanders coming to the UK to live, work and study, and they have been longing for the kind of restaurants they are used to visiting at home.
Since China's economic reforms began, the restaurant scene there has made a startling recovery after the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. The shabby, state-owned establishments have been dying off to be replaced by a new generation of eateries serving innovative food in opulent surroundings. High-end restaurants in the cosmopolitan cities of mainland China are a match for anything in London and New York in terms of cutting edge design, superb cooking and service that would befit an emperor.
And in an atmosphere of fevered competition, no style of cooking is more fashionable than the Sichuanese. London has smart Cantonese restaurants, Chinese restaurants that tailor their cooking to non-Chinese tastes, and the cheap-and-cheerful establishments of Chinatown. But despite the vast number of Chinese restaurants, there has been very little to tempt the new, cosmopolitan mainland diners-out, and many of them complain that they have nowhere decent to eat.
Shao Wei's plan was to bring real, contemporary mainland Chinese food culture to Britain, with an authentic Sichuanese restaurant. What impressed me most about him was his determination to do things properly, and his sense of cultural mission. He has managed to find a superbly talented head chef, Fu Wenhong, the former head chef of one of the trendy South Beauty (qiao jiang nan) Sichuan restaurants in China, and bring him to London, along with two other chefs, Zhang Xiaodong and Zhou Jianjun. The two other Sichuanese chefs, Fu Bing and Li Liang, were already working in the UK, and were delighted to have the chance to cook their own Sichuanese food again, rather than the Cantonese fare they were obliged to prepare in their previous jobs.
A Chinese designer, He Li, drew up the plans with Shao Wei, and sourced all the restaurant fittings in China, including the antique carved-wood panels, the Guanyin Buddha statue on the ground floor and the classical furniture. All the serving dishes, including the unusual stone pots (for a chicken-and-mushroom dish) and the divided hotpots were imported from China, as were key ingredients such as Sichuan pepper, chilli-and-broad-bean paste and pickled chillies. Everyone who has worked on the Bar Shu project, except for me, is Chinese or Malaysian-Chinese: from the manager to the builders, waiters and electricians. The restaurant is deliberately located outside the touristy chinoiserie of Chinatown: it is not intended to be a "Chinatown" restaurant but something completely different. Bar Shu is the kind of establishment you would encounter in China itself. Admittedly, in China it would probably be five times the size, but the style, the mix of nostalgic and new design elements and the bold pictorial menu are all very typical.
My role as a consultant has been to advise on how to encourage non-Chinese customers to make the most of Sichuanese cuisine, and it's been a fascinating exercise. One funny consequence has been that at meetings, which are conducted mainly in Chinese, I have found myself talking about my own compatriots as lao wai, the mainland Chinese term for foreigner. "But Fuchsia," other members of staff keep saying, "this is Britain, and you are English, we are the lao wai over here."
We knew that the Chinese community would love the restaurant (Shao Wei has been pestered for months by mainlanders desperate for it to open). We wanted to make sure that it was appealing for non-Chinese too. One of the first issues was the name of the restaurant itself. We wanted a Chinese name with a pleasing sound and cultural resonance, but we also needed something that would sound good to non-Chinese speakers. We were keen to avoid all the cliches, the moons and gardens and Chinas and so on, but at the same time wanted something snappy and strongly Sichuanese.
In the end we chose two different names, one in Chinese and one in English. The Chinese name is the poetic shui yue ba shan, which can roughly be translated as "water, moon, the mountains of Ba". The English name, Bar Shu, was my idea: a transliteration of the names of the two ancient kingdoms of Sichuan, Ba and Shu, which is often used in China as a poetic name for Sichuan. We thought it sounded distinctive and catchy in English, while being replete with Sichuanese meaning.
The menu itself, of course, was of paramount importance. We all wanted this to be a Chinese restaurant on Chinese terms, one which would introduce lao wai to the delights of Sichuanese cuisine, but not at the expense of authenticity. So we refused to bowdlerise the menu, including organ meats and tripe, and avoiding the safe Anglo-Cantonese dishes like beef in black bean sauce. There's also a whole section for the fabulously expensive Chinese delicacies like shark's fin and sea cucumber that non-Chinese guests are unlikely to order (they are eaten for their texture, tonic properties and social cachet rather than for their taste, but are de rigueur at really smart Chinese banquets).
The chef's first draft was typical of fashionable Sichuanese restaurants in China, with an emphasis on new wave Sichuan dishes and more expensive ingredients. I argued passionately that we should also include some of the classic traditional dishes, like Gong Bao chicken, dry-braised fish, fish-fragrant aubergines, and dry-fried beans, which now seem passé to trendy young Chinese, but are fantastically delicious and brand new (in their authentic versions) to Londoners. These are the dishes which first seduced me and my European student friends when we lived in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, and which I have cooked for years at my London dinner parties to a rapturous reception.
Happily, they have turned out to be some of Bar Shu's most popular dishes. The Gong Bao chicken and dry-fried beans have been a huge hit with the non-Chinese guests, but are rarely ordered by the Chinese, while the dry-braised fish is adored across the board.
We wondered if a glossy pictorial menu would look tacky to Londoners, but in the end decided to stick with it, do it the Chinese way, and try to overcome any possible prejudice (in the event, customers have found it helpful to see pictures of some of the dishes, and we've had no negative feedback). We decided to structure the menu in a Sichuanese way, which means, for example, that soups appear towards the end (the Sichuanese like to drink light, clear soups towards the end of the meal, to cleanse the palate after the robust and often fiery flavours of the other dishes.) I translated the menu into accurate and (I hope) elegant English, and included brief introductions to menu sections and descriptions of dishes. I've also written some advice on ordering, and drawn up some set menus to use as guidelines, which will shortly be introduced.
Another perplexing question was just how hot to make the food. After the opening, we decided to tone down the chilli heat and Sichuan pepper tingle a little: not, as you might assume, for the benefit of the lao wai, but more for the Malaysian and Hong Kong guests who preferred a more delicate assault on the senses. Do not imagine that this is a bastardisation of the true flavours of Sichuanese cuisine: the level of spiciness varies widely within Sichuan itself, and tends to decrease as you move up the social scale. The heat of the food we serve is typicalof that of more upmarket Chengdurestaurants.
As a consultant, I played a part in training the waiting staff, none of whom are Sichuanese. We had several tasting sessions where I introduced them to the flavouring techniques and cooking methods of Sichuanese cuisine, and the history and cultural background to the dishes, and gave them bilingual notes on every dish on the menu. I advised them on the importance of preparing non-Chinese customers for their first taste of Sichuan pepper, of telling people that they weren't meant to eat the whole chillies or peppercorns, and warning them if a dish was especially bony. And I also hoped to inspire them with the idea that we were all working to bring something new and exciting to London, and a style of cooking that I was sure the city would adore.
For me, the whole project has been and continues to be tremendous fun. I still can't believe that I'm able, at last, to eat real Sichuanese food in London, without having to cook it myself. I love to hear the melodious tones of Sichuan dialect in the kitchen, to smell the richness of chilli-and-broad-bean paste and scorched chillies, and to feel the tingle of fresh Sichuan pepper.
And I've been amazed to see how quickly Londoners seem to have embraced this radical new take on Chinese cuisine. I was always sure they would love it but I didn't expect so many people to be ordering duck with konnyaku jelly, spicy offal and numbingly hot hotpot within the first couple of weeks.
Fuchsia Dunlop is the FT's Chinese food writer and the author of a book on Hunan cuisine, 'Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook', to be published by Ebury Press in August. She is also the author of 'Sichuan Cookery' published byPenguin
Bar Shu, 28 Frith Street, London W1D 5LF, tel: +44 (0)20-7287 8822
