Fay Maschler reviews Poon's pop-up: The prodigal daughter brings her father’s Chinese classics up to date

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Fay Maschler4 April 2018

A sneakily sweet, aniseedy, thin, knobbly, dark sausage with candlewax fat, sinewy texture and haunting flavour — maybe thanks to having been pegged out on the line on a breezy day — wind-dried sausage was a discovery I made in the 1970s. It was at the original Poon’s restaurant in Lisle Street, Chinatown and then at the later shinier Poon’s in King Street Covent Garden, one of the first London restaurants to make its kitchen a focal point of the design. If I remember rightly, chefs worked and wokked in a large glazed box.

Chinese supermarkets sell packets of wind-dried sausages — including the Poon’s brand — and I usually have some in the fridge. Slice thinly on the diagonal, steam until the fat is translucent and the flesh biddable; fold into boiled or steamed rice. It is a taste, a method of seasoning, like no other and can of course insinuate itself helpfully into salads and other assemblies.

Seventh-generation master chef Bill Poon and his wife Cecilia retired from the restaurant business in 2006. Their daughter Amy, who as a girl worked in all of the family’s establishments and was absolutely hell-bent on not going into the business, has recently opened Poon’s Pop-up in Clerkenwell in that odd three-sided square off Central Street that also houses the chippie plus plus that is Fish Central. Like so many pop-ups — trading in this instance probably until late May — it is destined for a permanent site and, I suspect, a roll out.

As Amy puts it, “What chance does one stand against kismet?” but the path to her destiny has encompassed schooling at Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire, corporate PR and advertising in Tokyo and London, the Asian art market and Singapore’s first Champagne bar. She is one smart cookie. As for her fortune? Well, she has Kate Mogford, founder of event caterers Rare working alongside.

The aim of the menu and the project is a celebration of Cantonese home cooking with a couple of the original Poon’s dishes incorporated

The premises, formerly The Alchemist, are spacious and light with suitable whimsical detail like Chinese lanterns but marble-top tables like Pizza Express. In the kitchen the cooks are Westerners. Amy’s contention is that if Westerners can make Thai food and Indian food, why not Chinese? She senses that London restaurant-goers and their children are now more at home with Japanese food — “Let’s go out for some sushi!” they cry  — than Chinese and, leaving aside dim sum which in my experience all children unreservedly adore, I sort of get her point. The aim of the menu and the project is a celebration of Cantonese home cooking with a couple of the original Poon’s dishes incorporated. 

Among the first courses vegans can safely graze. Bowls of crushed radishes with chilli oil and garlicky Shanghainese cucumbers are preferable to the (inevitably) limp, tame “spicy” aubergine salad. And I prefer the more intemperate Sichuan approach to cucumbers — whacked or smashed before being imbued with garlic, sesame oil, peppercorns and rice vinegar. 
 

Thousand-year-old “Pi Dan” eggs with preserved ginger have those weird amber-like whites and grubby yolks but are pleasant to chase round the plate with the bright red chopsticks. Won tons tossed in red chilli oil should certainly be part of an order (not for you vegans though).

Poon’s wind-dried bacon san choy bao could equally be titled pork in lettuce wrap and there is little trace of that beguilingly spectral mummified flavour in the signature dish of claypot rice with salumi and wind-dried bacon. The best part of this bowlful is the scorched rice that forms a combative crust on the inside.

Hainanese chicken rice, one of my favourite dishes in the world, bringing together as it does every advantage a chicken possesses including the potential for savoury bone broth to pervade rice before condiments including ginger are brought to bear. Somehow the plateful here featuring arid chicken misses the point. It might be the moment when you think a Chinese chef would do it better… Beggar’s bowl Hakka pork belly is dark in not a good way.

Tune in again vegans — or anyone else — for stir-fried pea shoots with garlic and poached seasonal greens with vegetarian oyster sauce. They are virtuous but not, as it were, absolutely essential to your well-being. Deep-fried ice cream with oolong tea syrup may be more so.

Fay Maschler's 50 favourite restaurants in London

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Bill Poon is apparently acting as consultant chef and maybe he needs to crack the whip more sharply in the kitchen. I see a movie here about a venerable father dreaming of his early life in Macau and a daughter in Christian Louboutin stilettos click-clacking into what is for all of us an uncertain future. 
Meanwhile, the absence of a liquor license means that for a modest mark-up (£8 corkage) you can drink excellent wines as my chum Scott and I did. I brought the white, he brought the red and we had a merry time despite food that needs more work. 

Forty-five years ago it was wind-dried sausages. Now in the Poon’s Pantry Essentials Range the company is offering us Premium First Extract Gluten-Free Soya Sauce made from non-GMO beans, the soya sauce equivalent of extra-virgin olive oil. It’s called moving with the times. 

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