Mr Chow in London is not an ordinary restaurant. The cuisine is Mandarin, but the service reminds you of an old fashioned Italian restaurant somewhere in Manhattan (a long time ago). When you enter the place, you see a kitschy billboard “1968”, while the music played is somewhere between 1995 and 2005, in a cheap bar preferably and louder after 8 pm. On my left- a couple from Los Angeles, speaking about jet lag (very nice people), on my right- two men in their late thirties and in their expensive suits speaking about how Citigroup is going to fire 50 000 people. (Perhaps they are nice too, but can one trust somebody who is responsible for huge amounts of strangers’ money these days? :))
The food is something like what “creative Chinese” was in the late sixties. Caramelized prawns with caramelized walnuts (very sweat, but fresh and crunchy) shrimp and vegetable dumplings (had strange sour after taste, didn’t like them), caramelized pork “cubes” where there is more fat than muscle(delicious, but very very fat) and filets of the sole in a similar red sauce that pork was, just a little spicier. The only thing on the table that could be called “good for your health” were sauted whole green pea pods served with the pork.
Was my meal good? Absolutely, the same as Big Mac is delicious while you eat it, but after the fact, you want to forget what you ate. Will I ever come back to the place? Probably – “bad things” for your health are the most fun things to do, isn’t it?
