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It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster ride of excitement and disappointment (but mainly excitement) with this place. Let me explain.
Much anticipation ensued when we spotted a newly-opened Chinese restaurant around the corner from my work earlier this year. Brick Lane has more restaurants than you could shake a stick at, but has lacked a decent Chinese for a long time. The next nearest lunchtime option is Noodle King; about the best thing I can say about this place is that their servings are significantly larger than a Pot Noodle.
Our excitement increased when we spotted Red Bar’s menu—full of Szechuan and north-eastern Chinese specialities, many of which we recognised from the excellent Gourmet San (further down Bethnal Green road, but not open for lunch). Now Szechuan food excites me—it’s spicier and more intensely flavoured than the Cantonese-style food which most Chinese restaurants in London serve. What’s more, as a less well-known and spicier option, it’s usually prepared to a higher standard for more of a Chinese clientele.
My excitement was soon tempered, though, by a number of failed attempts to eat there at lunch. Red Bar’s opening hours can be a little sporadic, and it was a while until we got to eat there.
Boy, was it worth the wait.
The first thing we tried—Yu-Hsiang shredded pork—stuck with me as a favourite. Tender strips of pork, Chinese mushroom and vegetables come in an intensely flavourful sauce, full of garlic, chilli oil, Chinese wine and vinegar. Servings are big, and with some steamed rice this will leave you very satisfied.
I developed other favourites over a series of visits. Beef brisket with tomatoes is really tender, served in a thicker, delicately spiced sauce which is full of flavour. Lamb on fire (who can resist “on fire”?) comes wrapped in foil and surrounded by a slightly strange burning gel; it’s marinated in Chinese wine and spiced with lots of cumin, which for a moment almost recalled some of the curry joints down the other end of Brick Lane. But with black bean, the wine and other flavours, it makes for a tasty combination which I’d not tried before.
Another stand-out is sea bass, baked and served in foil with spring onions and (again!) a rich, intense sauce which also features cumin. Western cooking usually tries to avoid overpowering a fish like this, but here it totally works, the fish juices adding into the mix of flavours and producing something really rich and sublime.
This being Szechuan food of course, chilli does feature quite highly. Most of the drier dishes come with both smaller dried red chillis (quite lethal, but mainly just there to garnish and imbue flavour) and slices of the larger fresh red and green chillies, which are quite edible and tasty when cooked (taking the seeds out helps a bit). Some dishes, like the chilli king prawns, come with a giant pile of both.
It’s not all spice though; one soup starter we tried, while very large, was rather too watery. On the other hand, braised chicken and mushroom (which turned out to be virtually a soup) is excellent, with a dark fragrant broth and a generous helping of different dried mushrooms. Veggie dishes also turned out great, with yu-shiang sauce suiting the sweet sautéd aubergine particularly well.
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After a bunch of evening visits, it was a while until we tried the place again at lunchtime. So there was another rush of excitement a few weeks ago when we spotted the introduction of an unlimited £5 lunch buffet, which on our first visit included a dish of giant mussels!
The mussels sadly never returned; and the buffet options on the whole leaned a bit more towards their Cantonese-style takeaway menu, which we generally ignore at dinner in favour of the more interesting options. But these dishes are better done than the usual Chinese buffet, and with more of a chilli kick too. The buffet featured things like fried chicken, a great stew with beef, pork ribs, fish in a sauce, battered fish, tofu, noodles, egg-drop soup and more. Tasty and great value for money.
Disappointment was in store again, though. Demand seemed low for the buffet (we were the only customers sometimes) and they stopped doing it. Here’s hoping it comes back!
One question which many will ask is: how does Red Bar compare with Gourmet San along the road (one of London’s most recommended Szechuan restaurants)? It’s not yet as popular, so no queues to get a table, and some of the dishes which I’ve tried at both were slightly better presented down the road. But there’s really not a lot between them in terms of flavour, and on their top dishes I think Red Bar has a slight edge on the competition. They try a little harder than Gourmet San with the decor too, but it’s still fairly basic—it’s the food that matters here.
Price-wise it’s all very reasonable too, and unless you’re particularly hungry, you can easily share 3 main dishes between 4 (or 2 between 3). In fact, sharing is the best way to go with this food.
In short, a great local restaurant, and just what the area needed. There are lots more dishes for us to try (including some untranslated ones, some of which apparently are Hangzhou specialities, for even more variety!) and we’ll be back again and again.
In Broadway Market’s Buen Ayre, though, we have a new champion. We left the restaurant not only with sickeningly full stomachs, but with doggy bags full of two pounds of leftover steak—these salvaged from an even bigger pile of unconsumed meat. (Matthew got four days of steak sandwiches out of his doggy bag share.)
Why so much meat? Buen Ayre specialises in the Argentine art of the parillada, a mixed grill cooked on a parilla, an Argentine grill that’s hung above flaming charcoal with chains. Starting at £16.50 per person for a minimum of two diners, Buen Ayre’s parilladas are a vegetarian’s nightmare—sizzling heaps of Argentine sausage, black pudding, sweetbread, kidney and all manners of grilled steak. (The Parillada Mixta does however come with yummy grilled provolone and deliciously nutty pesto-stuffed mushrooms in place of short ribs.)
Irish-Argentine chef John Patrick Rattagan grew up barbecuing meat outside Buenos Aires, and the charred, juicy results really are Buen Ayre’s reason for existing. The lengthy menu extends to starters (we ordered empanadas and ox tongue) mains and sandwiches, but there’s hardly a vegetarian option to be found; the restaurant’s simple setting, a small, slightly cramped dining room with wooden floors, tables and chairs, means the meaty dishes are the main attraction.
We ordered two parilladas, the Mixta and the Al Paso, a lot of meat for even the most serious carnivore, but, as the last table of the night, when it came to portion size we did even better: the kitchen piled their leftover glut of sirloin steaks on top of our expected lump of flank steak, sausage, black pudding, short ribs, provolone and mushroom. On the side was the famous oil-chili-garlic-oregano sauce, chimichurri, and two bowls of fluffy, crispy chips (one bowl drenched in garlic and parsley), and our glasses were full of Argentine red from the lengthy wine list.
The challenge of chewing through such a mountain of flesh was made easier by fact that it was all pretty tasty. The rich blood sausages were swallowed effortlessly, and the steaks, though slightly tough, were nevertheless rare and well-seasoned, just the way we like them. (The lengua a la vinegreta, our marinated ox tongue starter, remained the highlight of the night, however—the vinegary, tender slices converted even those of us disgusted by ox tongue as children.) Come midnight and closing time, we were still happily (though sluggishly) chewing. We’ll be back—definitely without any vegetarians in tow.
Even after the first round of cold mezes we were comfortably full. There were dips of pretty much every Greek variety, from tzatziki to taramosalata, as well as salads and some cold shrimp. Of all the dips, I kept returning to a tasty tuna concoction, and, of course, the hummus. We made the mistake of trying to finish everything in front of us, forgetting that we had two further rounds to eat.
The hot mezes which followed were even better than the cold. Fried calamari was just right, neither too rubbery nor too crispy; grilled halloumi was also on just the right side of the rubbery/soft balance. There were spinach and feta pies, sausages, and yet another round of shrimp, this time fried and the better of the two shrimp dishes.
After an hour or so of eating we finally got onto the main course, with assorted chicken and lamb souvlaki, small lamb chops and a salad. Sadly the lamb was slightly overcooked, and our tongues so drowned in the Cypriot red wine and the tastes from the previous courses that it was hard to tell the different flavours apart in the souvlaki. Maybe I should have just stopped eating after the spinach pie.
As world cuisine geeks, we did wonder if we’d tried anything distinctively Cypriot. Maria—who hails from Greece and heartily approves of the place—confirmed that Greek Cypriot cooking is indeed quite similar to Greek. Halloumi is the national cheese of Cyprus though, and served with lountza (smoked pork lion, another local speciality), was perhaps the most Cypriot dish on the menu.
In hindsight, one of the best parts of this meal was the overall feel of the evening. We were never rushed, and through the general décor of the restaurant, it did feel like an evening in the Mediterranean. On emerging from the place at 11pm, I had three final thoughts: “We’re back in reality again”, “We really should have had this meal for lunch”, and “I am so, so full”.
