Chinatown – Ian Louis Harris

Dim Sum At New Loon Fung In Chinatown With Rohan Candappa, 2 August 2022

Are you a fan of dim sum?

…asked Rohan, while we were messaging each other to make the arrangements for a lunchtime meet up.

Is the sky blue, is the Pope a Catholic, do bears shit in the woods and is a pig’s arse pork?

…I felt like replying, but instead I sent Rohan a link to the Ogblog piece about my first ever dim sum experience, so long ago it was before I had even met Rohan…whom I met when we started Alleyn’s School in September 1973:

From Yan Chow (Or Do I Mean Yang Chow?) In Streatham To Dim Sum In Soho, Chinese New Year, Probably February 1972

In that case, let’s meet at 12:30 in the middle of Gerrard Street.

Great, I thought, this will be my first visit to Chinatown for years and I miss the place.

My childhood memory of trying dim sum for the first time must be my favourite anecdote about dim sum in Chinatown, but I do have another treasured memory on that topic.

In the mid to late 1990s, while working with the late, great Professor Mike Smith, we found ourselves nearby and decided to continue our discussions over a dim sum lunch. Studying an extensive card, I wondered whether Mike had ever tried duck tongues – a dish I had tried before (I think in Hong Kong) and rather liked. Mike said he was up for anything and thus we ordered, amongst several other things, a portion of tongues.

On tasting the anatine delicacy, Mike freaked out.

Oh my God – they’ve got bones in their tongues! Ducks have bones in their tongues! Uggh.

Even after we agreed that the bone-like core of the duck’s tongue was probably hard cartilage rather than bone, Mike was too discombobulated by the discovery to eat any more of that dish…

…which, to anyone who knew Mike well, proves that he was seriously discombobulated. Indeed, Mike told the “dim sum discovery that ducks have bones in their tongues” story to anyone who’d listen for ages after the event.

Returning to 2022, I wondered whether Rohan had chickened out (or should I say ducked out) of picking a venue, but it turned out he had a specific venue in mind all along: New Loon Fung. As we entered, I was pretty sure this was the same venue as the Mike Smith tongue incident all those years ago. Seeing duck tongues on the menu pretty much confirmed my theory – you don’t see those on the menu in many dim sum places in London.

I told Rohan the story. Of course he agreed we needed to order some, along with the several other things we both wanted to try.

Perhaps the waiters had a sense of foreboding about non-Chinese people ordering a delicacy so quintessentially Chinese as duck tongues. The restaurant was heaving by the time we placed our order, almost exclusively with people who were visibly Chinese or at least of Chinese origin.

We asked a couple of times for the tongues, once it was clear that all our other dishes had long since been delivered. Eventually our portion came:

*Duck got your tongue, Rohan?* He sure doesn’t look 100% sure

We “toasted” Mike, each of us with a tongue on our chopsticks, Rohan tried that one tongue, then he deferred the rest of the plate to me, leaving me in a similar position, plate of tongues-wise, as I had been in 25 or so years ago with Mike Smith.

I’m old enough and ugly enough now that I don’t do anything I don’t want to do…

…said Rohan, when I pressed the point, just to be sure he wasn’t simply deferring my chosen delicacy out of politeness.

I guess I might be on my own in the matter of liking the duck tongues dish – I recall Janie not much liking it either.

Rohan and I chatted about many things, including how most of the eateries we knew from the old days had gone from Chinatown – New Loon Fung being a rare perennial. I think it was known as Dragon Phoenix “back in the day”, but it looks and feels like the same place of old.

After parting company with Rohan, I took a stroll around Chinatown, confirming that most of my old haunts had vanished.

Strangely and most coincidentally, I got an e-mail from Michael Mainelli about 48 hours later asking me if I could recommend a place in Chinatown for him and the family to go to after a show – all the places he remembered had closed down since his last visit.

I was able to provide some helpful advice. Really I should put the time from my afternoon off onto my timesheet as R&D for the business. Only joking, only joking.

From Yan Chow (Or Do I Mean Yang Chow?) In Streatham To Dim Sum In Soho, Chinese New Year, Probably February 1972

Photo by Jason Jacobs, CC BY 2.0

When I was a small child, growing up in Streatham, there was not exactly a vast choice of restaurant cuisine to choose from. But there was a Chinese restaurant near home. Mum, dad and I all liked the food there.

*This image, from 1958, thanks to John Payne on Facebook*

In my memory it was named Yang Chow – perhaps the proprietors changed the name between 1958 and my childhood visits there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But that was the place. The “theatre” mentioned in the advert above is apparently the Streatham Hill Theatre, subsequently the Mecca Bingo Hall, although the restaurant was no more opposite the Bingo than it was opposite The Locarno, or The Cat’s Whiskers as it was known when I was munching food in the restaurant almost opposite those two landmarks.

My parents were friendly patrons in any restaurant we visited and we became friendly with the proprietor family. I cannot in truth remember the name of the matriarch patron, but for some reason the name Li pops into my head, perhaps falsely, but I’ll refer to her as Li in this article. I do remember the name of the proprietors’ little boy, Christopher, who was a similar age to me (perhaps a year or so younger), who would tend to show his face during our visits to the restaurant. Christopher and I became friends.

On one visit, Li announced that the restaurant would be closed for one weekend only as the family was going to celebrate Chinese New Year with family and friends in Soho that weekend. They wondered whether I would like to join them, to keep Christopher company.

I was keen. My parents were content. The date was arranged.

I’m not 100% sure that it was the 1972 new year, but I’m pretty sure I was around that age and something about “The Year Of The Rat” rings a bell. Again, the vague memory might be flawed.

But I am 100% sure how excited and awe-inspired I was by that event.

We went upstairs in a Soho Chinese Restaurant – sadly I have no recall which one it was. The beautiful sketch below might be the very one; who knows?

Terrence Dalley’s 1972 Sketch Of 43 Wardour Street

We sat at a large table and the upstairs room was packed with Chinese people. I think I might have been the only western face in the room.

Everyone seemed to know everyone – not only the people at our large table – which was presumably Christopher’s family and close friends – but the whole room felt a bit like one big party. It was probably an informal gathering of the suburban Chinese restaurateur community.

Writing 50 years later, it seems extraordinary that local Chinese restaurants might close for Chinese new year – a guaranteed busy time for all Chinese establishments today – but back then I don’t think the annual Chinese event had any traction in the wider community.

I remember lots of people making a fuss of me and I remember several people, especially Christopher’s parents, worrying that I might not like the food and letting me know that they could arrange for some food with which I was more familiar if I didn’t like the “party fare”…

But by gosh they needn’t have worried. The smells, the look of the food, the textures, the flavours. I’d never seen, smelled or tasted the like of it before.

I fell in love with dim sum that day and have never lost the love for it.

It was not all that long after this seminal event in my culinary journey through life that the Yang Chow closed and that family moved on, we knew not/know not where.

67 Streatham Hill in 2022 – from Googlemaps

Before the end of the Yang Chow era, I do vaguely remember my mum insisting on reciprocating the hospitality I had received by inviting Christopher over to our place for a homely meal. Whether he liked the meal and/or ended up associating matzo balls as a variant of dim sum is a matter seemingly lost to history…

…unless, by some chance, my posting of this article somehow helps re-establish contact with Christopher and/or that kind family, who initiated my love for westernised Chinese food at the Yang Chow and utterly entranced me with dim sum at a more authentic Chinese restaurant in Soho, all those decades ago.

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