Barshu Restaurant

Had a really lovely meal here to celebrate Chinese New Year - not that you'd have known it was NY, as the staff were very sullen; except when making jokes to each other on the radio system they use.
That said they were all very efficient and the food was delicious. We had twice cooked pork, which was really tasty, some delicious aubergine with sichuan peppers and lovely chicken parcels. Mmmm. With a glass of wine each the meal came to £60 so not cheap but pretty standard for central London.

This is an oasis of non Cantonese fare just north of Chinatown producing very good Sichuan cuisine.

My interest in the place was encouraged by the involvement as a consultant of the British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop as I had read her delightful book on Sichuan cooking. The first Westerner to train at the famed Sichuan cookery school in Chengdu, this lady knows her onions )and chillis)

All the starters on offer are cold, although smaller starter-sized portions of street foods including Dan-Dan noodles and dumplings in chilli oil are to be found at the back of the menu.

I recommend the Numbing-tongue Dried Beef with Sichuan Peppercorns to get your taste buds ready for what may follow - if you have been to Sichuan please note the food here is a toned down unless you request it Sichuan hot.

Over the last 18 months I have eaten most tings on the menu and recommend you try everything be it the well known Kung Po Chicken or Prawns to tripe or the amazing hot pot. Many dishes are not for the faint hearted.

The wine list is very poor and not thought through even though I understand it is difficult to choose wines that compliment this type of cuisine. I would like to see some Pino Grigio from North East Italy as well as some good Alsace.

Not something I decide lightly. But last night I went to Bar Shu and everything about dinner was magnificent. Started with cold chicken in sesame chilli oil and a salad of tree ears and coriander. Then, vastly over ordering, we had crispy beef shreds, red cooked pork, scallops steamed with ginger shreds, pock marked woman bean curd and dry fried green beans. And rice. Our waitress tried to explain it was too much, then gave up and said we could take leftovers home. Which we did. You should see my lunchbox today. The food was completely amazing - highly spiced, masses of chilli and szchewan pepper but intensely, deeply flavoured. And a nice nz sauvignon blanc as recommended by the waitress. I might like this place more than Anchor & Hope. Actually I do like this place more than A&H - but it's a very close call. Probably 80% chinese, 90% full over 2 floors on a Tuesday night in November. Seriously, seriously, seriously good.

I think it’s pretty much obvious to state that the majority of Cantonese restaurants in Chinatown have lapsed to a near state of comatose. There has to be wake-up call alert for these restaurateurs not too slide any further and loose the plot, evidence can be seen by the spread of restaurants offering faux Japanese cuisine, inferior ‘all you can eat for less than your weekly bus pass’ buffets and awkward fusion cow poo. What the restaurateurs need to ingest is the fact that Londoners are now a whole lot more savvy with their tastes, we’re not the tourists that can be so easily trapped with offerings of sweet and sour pork, lemon chicken, beef chow mein, and so on. No, we now want two things; to uphold the great Cantonese cuisine and to maintain high standards at all costs. If a bowl of won ton noodles is going to cost £7.00 instead of the usual £4.50 we’ll pay for it so long as the requisite assurance has been fully laden and justified. Last but not least they must also be worried sick with the emergence of China’s other regional alternatives like Bar Shu lurking with success in their midst.

To be honest I recommended this place as I was craving for some spiced up offal but my dining companion was having none of that, it was his birthday after all. Anyway we turned up tonight without a booking and it was pretty much packed at 7pm. The manager reluctantly allocated a table and stated we’ve gotta vacate the table in an hour and she meant it. I said no problems, it’s Chinese we’re having after all and by default it’s always quick. The ambience was lovely but a little too dark for yours truly as I suffer from a mild form of SADness (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I also like to see what I’m eating. Right three dishes and we’re off. The first dish of pickled string beans with minced pork was crunchy and delicious, in fact I could quite easily snack on this on its own with a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. The Sichuan standard of Pock marked Old Woman beancurd was the only chilli numbing dish we ordered; it was very very good and nothing like the one offered by your local takeaway. From my recollections I think Snazz Sichuan edges Bar Shu with the quality of beef mince and tofu used with this dish. The last dish of stir-fried lobster with ginger and spring onion was a meal unto itself; huge, gratifying and expensive. I need to go the Mandarin Kitchen in Queensway to draw comparisons. The lobster tasted fresh and sweet but the only qualm I had with this dish was the inclusion of some soba-ish noodles, the nuttiness of it somewhat didn’t bode happily with the sauce the lobster was cooked in. I think thin egg noodles would have been more appropriate for this dish instead. Finally never order this dish if you’re waiting to catch a plane or ask to vacate the table within the hour. I reckoned it took at least 40 minutes to finish it, what with the recovery of the sweet flesh from the claws and the near impossible parts of this great crustacean. The waiting staff wanted us to settle and leave. I left this place as a happy biscuit but 30 squid poorer.

Fuschia Dunlop, thank you for keeping an eye on the menu.

I'd been meaning to visit this place for a little while. Rumours had it that it was one of very few 'authentic' Szechuan restaurants in the UK with - shock horror! - the same menu for westerners and Chinese alike. Quite why it has taken until 2007 for Chinese restaurateurs to realise that most Londoners are quite capable of eating Szechuan cuisine without projectile vomiting over fellow diners Little Britain-style is a mystery to me. This in a city that allows the existence of Angus Steakhouses and that strange salty custard you get with your nachos in the cinema; we've had worse, believe me.

So I was looking forward to going because I knew it was going to be different. Just how different didn't become obvious until we were presented with the menus, boasting such delicacies as "Man and wife offal slices" (mmm!), "Pock-marked Old Woman's beancurd" (easy on the pockmark please waiter!) and "Exotic frog jelly stewed with papaya" (don't fob me off with standard frog!). Yes I know it's easy to take the mick out of translated menus, but these really were special and genuinely a million miles away from your standard local Chinese. Perhaps slightly worrying, however, was the inclusion of Shark's Fin Soup - I'm not sure of the sourcing of Bar Shu's shark's fin but I have a sneaking suspicion it's morally, if not legally, questionable, even if at £68 a pop we were in no danger of trying it.

As appetisers we ordered "Numbing-and-hot dried beef" and "Preserved duck eggs with green peppers". The eggs tasted just like standard pickled eggs, which was a slight disappointment because I had read they were supposed to taste very odd, like blue cheese. Thinking about it though, if they had tasted like blue cheese it may have been a taste sensation too far so perhaps it's for the best. The beef was very tasty, sweet and crispy with a good healthy dose of the Szechuan peppers, which up to this point I'd never tried and - wow - I was stunned. After a couple of spoonfuls my mouth felt as if it had been sprayed with anaesthetic, and was tingling like I'd been chowing down on an electric fence. Quite an extraordinary sensation, I can't believe this stuff isn't more popular.

Main courses were (sorry I forget the exact description) some sort of duck on the bone with a gelatinous vegetable, which tasted quite like a Thai curry, and "Shell-on prawns with pickled red chillies". The prawns were lovely and fresh, served with enough chilli to blow up Parliament, and with another healthy dose of the Szechuan peppers. By this point our mandibles were so numbed with the pepper we were having trouble talking - I was worried if it didn't wear off that we'd have to hail a cab home sounding like the Elephant Man, which I'm guessing isn't easy.

Anyway with sides of Chinese broccoli and a bit of rice, we were done, and when the feeling returned to our faces we ordered the bill. Now, it wasn't that cheap (£40-odd each), but for the experience of trying something so excitingly different it was really worth it. I suppose for a truly spartan Szechuan experience you could buy a bag of peppers and do handfuls of them at home, but I don't recommend this unless you're in a safe environment and with friends.