Fuchsia Dunlop

A couple more reviews of Ba Shan, the new London restaurant in the Bar Shu Group for which I work as consultant. Giles Coren, writing in the Times on Saturday, called it ‘A wonderful addition to my eating life… and a fresh new way to enjoy the most exciting food in the world’. Terry Durack, in the Independent on Sunday, found it ‘immediately charming’, and enjoyed ‘a meal of such distinct and interesting textures and flavours… a gastronomic tour of the provinces of China that Chinatown forgot’. 

by Danny Elwes

Time Out published a glowing review of Ba Shan, the latest restaurant in the Bar Shu Group, last week – five out of six stars! 

And Richard Vines, writing on Bloomberg.com, called it ‘the most exciting new Chinese restaurant I’ve tried in London since Bar Shu three years ago’. 

I have to say that I’m seriously addicted to the guo tie (pot-stickers) and the dumplings in chilli oil sauce.

The new restaurant, Ba Shan, was the subject of Fay Maschler’s main review in the Evening Standard on Wednesday. And there’s already a review up on Time Out’s website, which mentions ‘the exquisite food and impossibly cheery service‘ – we understand that it will appear in the magazine itself the week after next. It was a blogger, however, who had the first word on the new restaurant, visiting it even before the sign had been put up outside!

The latest restaurant in the Bar Shu family, Ba Shan, has just opened – with me as consultant, once again. I’ve been involved in drawing up the menu, and for the last few months in intensive tasting (what a hardship!). The new place looks beautiful – it’s an old building in London’s Soho, just across from Bar Shu, with an interior that has been designed to evoke the atmosphere of an old Chinese county town, complete with puppet theatre!

We have a team of chefs specially brought over from different provinces of China, including Sichuan, Henan and Shaanxi, and the menu offers snacks and light dishes from all these regions. My current favourites are the Sichuanese spiced cucumber salad, the Xi’an pot-sticker dumplings (which I reckon are the best in London), the steamed lotus leaf buns stuffed with stewed pork, and the blanched choy sam with fragrant ginger and spring onion. But everything’s pretty delicious.

It’s a more casual restaurant than Bar Shu, and guests are invited to make up their own meal from a selection of small dishes, rather in the manner of Spanish tapas or Cantonese dim sum.

I hope to be able to post some enticing photographs in the next couple of days.