Noodle Inn Centro, Sheffield

After a few false starts I've finally eaten a really good Chinese meal in Sheffield. The Noodle Inn restaurants come highly recommended from those in the know, and after a solo visit to the original branch on London Road a while back I was almost convinced, but the gargantuan menu made it tricky to pinpoint the good stuff.

The new branch in town has a slightly more focused approach, there's still a lengthy Cantonese and Sichuan menu but no dim sum list to complicate things further. All of the main dishes are available as one plate meals with rice, a great option if there aren't enough you for a full on sharing feast (and if your dining companion isn't a spice fiend).

Gong bao chicken (it might have been kung pao on the menu here) was a cracking rendition. Laced with sichuan pepper and chilli and coated in an addictive sticky salty-sweet sauce, there are few things more pleasurable than scooping this stuff up with chopsticks. It's not just the flavour that satisfies, but the mouth feel; soft chicken, the crack and yield of nuts (cashews rather than peanuts strangely), tongue tingling pepper, fluffy rice.

A plate of salt and chilli chicken wings were also damn fine and utterly more-ish, as you'd expect meaty wings fried to a good crisp and smothered in fried onions, garlic and chilli to be. 

Sweet and sour chicken's not really my cup of tea, but A was happy with hers and it looked like a decent version. Only veggie spring rolls were a pointless, but then they always are.

The one plate meals are all under a tenner, remarkable value given their enormity. We took home enough leftovers for another full meal. In total we paid around £28 including a drink each and service. Free ice cream for afters too!

I'll definitely be returning to Noodle Inn. The keen pricing and name suggests a pile-it-high noodle bar, big on quantity but lacking in quality, but don't let that put you off as the food is far better than that provided you order carefully. A Red Chilli style Sichuan knees-up is definitely on the cards.

8/10

15 Westfield Terrace
Sheffield
S1 4GH

http://www.noodleinncentro.co.uk/

Northern Food on tour: New Year in London part 1

Mega-post alert. We spent three nights in London over the new year festivities, you might not be surprised to discover that eating was a very important part of the trip. By very important I mean that's mostly what we did, alongside the drinking of course.

I'll never get round to writing up each meal individually, so here's a warts and all round-up, good and bad, in mostly chronological order, of the whole lot.

To make things a little more manageable I've split the post into two, this first one covers the casual and the unplanned, the second post will be of the two slightly more upmarket places we ate at.

Ikea, Milton Keynes

You'll probably be aware that Scandinavian food is the hot ticket right now. The Nordic dining revolution has made the short voyage across the sea to our shores, and is making waves in London and the South-east. It's an intriguing mix, connecting food to culture with an almost palpable sense of place, ground-breaking in its sourcing and preparation of foraged ingredients, terroir on the plate in the most literal way.

What better way, we thought, than to introduce ourselves to this cuisine with a trip to a restaurant run by an organisation that's done more than any other to bring Scandinavian food to the people of Britain. So we went to Ikea in Milton Keynes for lunch. As you do.

I'm not quite sure how it came about, but it was something like this: no breakfast + bored on the M1 + traffic jam + discussion about meatballs + pouring rain making original outdoor plans unlikely = sod it let's go to Ikea for lunch.

The meatballs are an experience. Nice in a rubbery, filthy sort of way, but I'm not convinced by the weird milky gravy. And the lingonberry stuff is just crap jam. Crap jam with weird milky gravy isn't a great combination I don't think. Next time I might have my meatballs unadorned.

We had apple cake with vanilla sauce for pudding. I really enjoyed the cake, it was moist with good fat chunks of tart apple in. Scan-delicious! The sauce was rubbish again though. It had the taste and texture of Bird's custard after you've mixed the powder into the milk but before you've cooked it. Weird.

Would I go again? Yes, it's inevitable. Avoid the weird sauces. Cheap.

5/10

Bletcham Way
Milton Keynes
MK1 1QB

http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/store/milton_keynes


Baozi Inn Takeaway, Chinatown

Baozi Inn is a little Sichuan cafe in Chinatown, I've eaten there a couple of times but not for a few years. The good news is they've opened a little takeaway next door that sells nothing but skewers and buns.

The skewers (£1.00-£1.20 each) are boiled to order in a dirty great vat of spicy broth laced with salt, chilli and Sichuan pepper. The result is stonkingly good: tender morsels of meat or veg intensely flavoured from the broth. There are loads of varieties, I only got as far as lamb and enoki mushroom, both of which were great.

The buns (bao) are big fat steamed dough monsters stuffed with pork and onion, sturdy and filling for the harsh winters in Northern China (or to fill a 15 Ikea meatball sized space before a trip to theatre). Two quid each.

8/10

27 Newport Court
Chinatown
London
WC2H 7JS


Princi, Soho

Princi is the sort of place I wish existed elsewhere in the UK, but just doesn't. This sort of thing only seems to work with the critical mass of London.

It's a big bustling Italian bakery-cafeteria-bar-takeaway. You shove your way to a space at the counter, shout out your order from an impressive display of baked goods, pizza, filled focaccia, salads, pasta, meat dishes and god knows what else, collect your drinks from the bar then elbow your way to any vacant space on the communal tables. Not the place for peace and quiet, but for a lively drink or two accompanied by some quality snacks (or a three course dinner if you feel like it) it's an excellent choice.

Pasta pesto and mozzarella and tomato salad were both very good. Beautiful milky cheese, tomatoes with some semblance of taste (which will do for me at the end of December) and grassy, herbal pesto. The pizza was just ok though, I'm never a fan of the thick rectangles of pizza a taglio stuff, not even in Italy.

Given the central location prices are reasonable. We paid just over a tenner for the food and a bottle of water.

7/10

135 Wardour Street
Soho
London
W1F 0UT

http://www.princi.com/




Full Stop Cafe, Brick Lane

A pleasant coffee shop with a few comfy sofas. The coffee, when it eventually arrived after nigh on twenty minutes, was satisfyingly robust. Yes I know that quality coffee isn't made in an instant, but twenty minutes is still too long in a not very busy place.

Still, at least we got to amuse ourselves eavesdropping on the conversation at the neighbouring table during the wait. This being East London hipster central it was mostly about their unbridled talent going unrecognised, this being the fault of others, his issues with anger and hers with Tatiana, ya? The joy.

£2.70 for a flat white. A bit much but probably par for the course in these parts. And still cheaper than Costa so on second thoughts that's good value.

7/10

202 Brick Lane
London
E1 6SA


The Breakfast Club, Spitalfields

We only ended up at the Breakfast Club as our original brunch choice was closed over Christmas and New Year. It was good enough to entice us back on New Year's Day for a hangover cure before the journey home.

It was an infuriating place though, with the makings of excellence being let down by shoddy execution in parts. The coffee was just ok, too milky and not very well made.

The bacon sandwich was also a misfire, but I shan't bang on about it having already done so here.

But the cinnamon French toast with roasted apples and syrup was bloody lovely, so much so that I voted it my breakfast of the year (and shared a plateful the day after, making it a contender for the 2013 award too!).

The half monty breakfast continued the trend. Beautifully poached eggs of unusually high quality (dark yellow yolks that actually tasted of something) balanced out by everything else on the plate being mediocre.

Breakfast plates are priced from around six quid up to a tenner, fair enough, but drinks are a little pricey. Service is brisk and the atmosphere verging on raucous, busy with loud music. Depending on your level of delicacy this could be a good or bad thing.

7/10

12-16 Artillery Lane
Spitalfields
London
E1 7LS

http://www.thebreakfastclubcafes.com/

Noodle Inn, Sheffield

I'm on the hunt for really good Chinese food in Sheffield, I'm sure it's out there somewhere as there are plenty of options and what looks to be a sizeable Chinese community in the city.

So far what I've eaten has been uninspired, so given a good few recommendations I'd received for the place I had higher hopes for Noodle Inn. It's hard to tell after just one meal, especially when dining alone with little opportunity to give the menu a good going over, but I'd say it just about delivered.

The Sichuan section of the menu warrants the most attention, as apparently they have a chef who hails from there, but there's also a great long list of Cantonese stuff and even a separate dim sum menu.

Beef flank with noodles in Sichuan hot and sour soup was a monumental bowlful, so much so that I barely got through more than half of it. The meat was the star here, whacking great hunks of gelatinous long braised stuff, intensely beefy and worth the effort taken in prising every morsel from it's protective layer of wobbly fat.

The broth, in comparison, was disappointing. It was a bit one dimensional, sour with plenty of chilli heat but not much else to offer, and only the merest hint of Sichuan pepper numbness (though perhaps that's all this dish is supposed to have?) The noodles, which I think were a potato starch variety, were good and sturdy, but not really my favourite type being overly glutinous.

A side order of steamed prawn dumplings from the dim sum menu were slightly overcooked, the skins just starting to stick a little, but the sweet, bouncy prawn filling was spot on.

The bill was just £11.90 including a soft drink, and there's free ice cream for afters if you want it (I didn't, it was pissing icy rain outside and I was in a hurry). Service wasn't exactly enthusiastic but everything arrived promptly enough. On the whole this was good, and the menu definitely deserves further investigation. I'll be back.

7/10


156 London Road
Sheffield
S2 4LT

http://www.noodleinn.co.uk/

Hong Kong Wok, Sheffield

Hong Kong Wok is a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant, one of several on the London Road strip. I doubt it serves the best food in the vicinity, but the staff are friendly, prices low and portions enormous. Just the thing for a casual, low key Friday night.

There's a full menu of individual dishes, covering all the usual Cantonese stuff and a few Sichuan dishes, and a great big long list of one plate meals, appropriately named 'Wok Woppas'. Appropriately named as they are indeed whoppers.

We started, customarily but completely unnecessarily with some crispy duck and pancakes, and a bowl of chicken and sweetcorn soup just to make sure. Then onwards to our woppas.

I can't recall ever having been served a single plate of food so unfeasibly large, certainly not for £6.50 anyway. I had the ma po tofu (on rice), a classic Sichuan dish that's supposed to be tofu, some sort of mince (beef or pork) and some vegetables in an oily broth laced with chillies and Sichuan pepper. Depending on how you wish to translate it you might like to call the dish 'pockmarked old woman's tofu' or perhaps 'leprous old crone's tofu'. Yum.

Slightly disturbing names aside, done right this is a really satisfying dish that warms the cockles with layers of chilli heat and numbing spice (ma la) from the Sichuan pepper. This version was tasty enough, hot and savoury, but completely lacking in the ma la element leaving it a bit one dimensional. The sauce was a bit too cornflour-gloopy as well.

AS had a serviceable and also humongous plate of special fried rice, most of which we took home for Saturday lunch.

With a couple of booze drinks the bill was still less than thirty quid, but you could be in and out for well under a tenner a head if you stick to the one plate meals. The food wasn't brilliant but I'm still rather enamoured with the place; everything was just so generous. Plenty of food, friendly service, free ice cream for afters and fortune cookies!

6/10

200-204 London Road
Sheffield
S2 4LW

http://www.hkwok.co.uk/

Hui Wei, Sheffield

Tired and not really paying attention, we must have ordered one of the most disjointed, incoherent meals ever at Hui Wei the other Monday night. The excitement of the Olympic torch relay must have gone to our heads. As soon as we were seated in a comfy dark booth I was ready for bed.

We accidentally ordered nothing but meat and carbs, where a dish of greens would really have gone down a treat. As such I didn't really enjoy the whole meal as much as I should have done, but looking at each dish objectively there was some good stuff here.

I was after the Sichuan dishes, AS was after anything as long as it involved roast duck with pancakes. The duck was fine, but I didn't eat a great deal of it saving myself for spicier, garlicky treats to follow.

Ants climbing up a tree was a new Sichuan dish to me. I'd heard of it but never eaten it, probably because it's not on the menu at Red Chilli. A colossal bowl of crispy thread noodles is brought to the table alongside a gravy boat filled with errr gravy I suppose. Gravy made primarily from ground pork, garlic, chillies and oil that is. That's my sort of gravy. The noodles are doused in the gravy which makes them crackle and pop rice krispies style, reducing down to a spicy, noodly slop. Good fun and good to eat as well. One to share in a group though as it got a bit boring after a while.

Pan-fried beef with chillies and Sichuan peppercorns hit the mark spice-wise, with a three pronged assault. Vibrant, fresh sliced chillies, deep smoky dried chillies and numbing, tingly Sichuan pepper. Lovely flavour but let down by being swamped in too much gloopy, cornflour based sauce. It would have been better dry or oily rather than saucy.

Duck, pork and beef clearly not being enough meat, we had some Northern style pork dumplings as well, just to make sure. The filling was beautiful, tender, savoury and fragrant with chives. The wrappers less so, being a bit too thick and doughy in parts.

Including rice, tea and one glass of wine the bill came to around forty quid. Reasonably good value. I can't quite work out whether they specialise in Cantonese or Sichuan food here, or maybe something else (Beijing?), but either way the food was good although I've had better versions of most of it elsewhere. Service was friendly and efficient.

6/10

Hui Wei
221 Glossop Road
Sheffield
S10 2GW


www.huiwei.co.uk

Zen Delight, Leeds

I chanced upon an interesting new Chinese place the other night. It's a casual looking café style space, obviously aiming for the lunch market with set Chinese meal deals and a sandwich menu. There's also a list of more interesting meals and specialities, and these are what caught my attention as I stopped to glance at the menu in the window.

There are a few Sichuan dishes, and also some from Dongbei and (I think) Beijing, both in Northern China. I had a chat with the friendly woman behind the counter who said they'd only been open a few days and were hoping to keep some 'real Chinese food' (her words) on the menu as well as the other stuff. She also mentioned that the chef was from Dongbei so any dishes from there might be worth investigating.

I ordered Sichuan chilli chicken, Di San Xian (a vegetable dish of aubergine, potato and peppers) and some boiled rice.

The chilli chicken was a completely dry dish, not exactly what I was expecting but bloody wonderful. Imagine KFC popcorn chicken but good. Deep fried chunks of chicken on the bone, crunchy and greaseless, smothered in garlic, sichuan pepper, chilli, spring onion and sesame seeds.

I dived in with my fingers and polished the lot off in about five minutes. Salty, spicy, tongue tingling and highly addictive.

The veg dish was much gentler, but also very good. Stewed or braised in a very garlicky sauce, the potatoes and aubergines were soft and savoury, and crispy bits of fried garlic provided textural contrast.

All in all a very pleasant surprise and a welcome addition to Leeds' Asian dining scene which is starting to reveal some hidden depths. I'll be back here, the food is good, the staff friendly and prices are reasonable for the quality of the cooking (this meal cost just over £13).

That's me done for the next few days, Merry Christmas everyone!

8/10

Zen Delight
Swinegate (not sure what number, but it's about halfway between Salt's Deli and Malmaison)
Leeds
LS1

Sichuan stir-fried green beans with minced pork

Stir-fried beans with minced pork is a classic Sichuan dish. I've seen it on the menu of every Sichuan restaurant I've ever been to and I love it (5 or 6 of them, enough to know it's a running theme). A cracking version at Red Chilli the other weekend reminded me that it was about time I tried to cook it again.

On the couple of occasions I've attempted the dish before the results have been reasonable but I've never quite hit the nail on the head. It's never quite scaled the heights of deliciousness found in a good restaurant version. This time was better, I think I've nearly cracked it so I thought I'd share the recipe.

I did three things differently this time. I used pork belly and minced it by hand, I added shaoxing rice wine and I added a sachet of preserved vegetables. The pork belly was all my idea, but I can't claim credit for the wine and veggies as I perused plenty of recipes online that suggest their inclusion. The resultant method and quantities however are all my own work.

Cutting the meat by hand from a piece really sorted the texture out. You want little tiny nuggets of meat rather than actual mince which will either disintegrate into mush or form longer strands rather than nuggets. I used belly but shoulder would also work as I still trimmed quite a lot of the excess fat from the belly.

The rice wine and preserved veggies provided the depth of flavour and umami succulence (MSG may have been present in the preserved veg) that was otherwise lacking.

In it's original incarnation I think this is supposed to be a vegetable dish with pork garnish, but I upped the meat quotient a bit for no reason other than that I wanted more pork. One strip of pork belly should be plenty but you may want to use less if you are having this as a side dish. At Red Chilli this was our vegetable dish alongside other mutton, chicken and pork dishes so extra pork in the veggies wouldn't really have been necessary. Obviously a little bit of pork in the veggies was necessary, but not a lot. One has to consider arterial health on occasion.

The resultant dish should have an intensely savoury flavour balanced by some sweetness. It should also pack a punch from the chillies and make your lips tingle from the Sichuan pepper. All this, coupled with the fact it will contain lots of pork fat should combine to make it very more-ish indeed.

The more unusual ingredients are readily available in Oriental supermarkets.

You will need

These quantities will serve 2 as a main meal with rice, more as a side dish.
100g piece of pork belly
200g green beans
half a tsp sichuan peppercorns
handful of dried chillis
3 tbsps shaoxing rice wine
5 cloves garlic
an inch of ginger
3 spring onions
2 tbsps soy sauce
white pepper
vegetable oil
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 sachet of Sichuan preserved vegetable (made with mustard greens I think)

What to do

1. The first step is to prepare the meat. Cut any large quantities of excess fat from your meat, but don't get carried away as you still want it quite fatty.

2. Chop the meat into very small, almost minced pieces. The easiest way to do this is to attack it with scissors for a good five minutes.

3. Put your finely chopped meat into a small mixing bowl and add a good pinch of white pepper, a tbsp of soy sauce and a tbsp of shaoxing rice wine. Give it a good stir and set aside.

4. Top and tail your green beans, then cut them into roughly equal sized pieces. Get a wok on a medium-hot heat with a generous glug of vegetable oil and a tbsp of sesame oil in it.

5. Add the green beans to the wok and fry them until the surfaces start to blister and the insides are cooked but retain a little bite. This should only take 3 or 4 minutes. When they are done remove from the wok with a slotted spoon and put them onto kitchen paper to soak up any excess oil.

6. Whilst the beans are frying finely chop, crush or grate the garlic and ginger (I grated it) and slice the spring onions. Crush the sichuan peppercorns lightly in a pestle and mortar (if you haven't got one just bash them up a bit with something heavy on your chopping board). Open the sachet of preserved vegetables and have the dried chillies, soy sauce and rice wine to hand. Make sure all of this is done before the next step, as the rest of the cooking process takes only 4-5 minutes so you need to have everything ready to throw in quickly.

7. After the beans have been removed keep the wok on the heat and add the pork. Stir-fry it for a minute or two, don't worry if it sticks or catches as the crusty bits are delicious.

8. Add the handful of dried chillies and stir-fry for another few seconds, then add the garlic, ginger and sichuan pepper, then stir-fry for another minute or so.

9. Add the sachet of preserved vegetables and the beans, then stir-fry for another minute or so.

10. Throw in a good glug of shaoxing rice wine (about 2tbsps) and a glug of soy sauce (about 1 tbsp) and fry for one more minute.

11. Garnish with the spring onions and serve immediately with steamed rice.

...and finally, apropos of nothing other than to cheer me up here are a couple of photos taken in the Dales on Sunday. Just a little reminder that we do have blue skies from time to time in dank, dark November.

Red Chilli, Leeds (revisited)

On my last visit to Red Chilli it was a little below par. Things that should have been a full on assault on the senses were a little dull, a little mild. A return visit on Saturday found it right back on form, four of us had a corker of a meal.

I was dining with Red Chilli first-timers, attempting to persuade them that a few pints and a Sichuan feast was a fine alternative to a few pints and a curry. Friends duly persuaded. We'll be back.

Stir-fried french beans with chilli and minced pork is one of my all time favourite Chinese dishes. Heat-blistered beans, al dente, dripping in spicy, porky oil and covered in tender little nuggets of salty meat. Lush.

Gong bao diced chicken with peanuts and dried chilli comes doused in a sweet, spicy sauce. The peanuts and chicken provide a wonderful contrast in textures.

The only dish I'd never ordered before, stir fried frog's legs with big Grandma's chilli sauce. Sweet and spicy again, but this time with the inclusion of black beans which gave it a salty, slightly funky fermented edge. Impossible to eat with chopsticks this, fingers were a must. Messy, sticky fun.

The last, but very much not least of the big dishes, spicy hot poached mutton. A huge vat of broth packed with shards of meat, assorted greens, about a bulb of garlic and copious quantities of dried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Lip tingling, meaty, more-ish, sweat-inducing deliciousness.

And finally, a couple of plates of dumplings. They make these fresh so they actually turned up after everything else. The boiled ones were Beijing style minced pork and prawn, and were spot on. Perfectly cooked skins and a moist, fragrant filling.

The others were Guotie, Beijing style minced pork fried dumplings. Equally good skins and filling, and they got the crusty fried exterior just right too.

A fantastic meal all round, and great value. Prices on the menu may not look that cheap, but bear in mind everything is served in enormous portions. The mutton alone could probably have fed a family of four. We finished the lot, and stuffed to the gills toddled off to the next pub, where a bottle of wine was ordered due to lack of room for beer.

The bill came to £17 each including a beer apiece and plenty of boiled rice. We threw in £20 each and left it that, as the service was just as good as the food. It can be inconsistent, but on this form Red Chilli deserves all the accolades it gets. Brilliant.

9/10

6 Great George Street
Leeds
LS1 3DW

http://www.redchillirestaurant.co.uk/

Red Chilli, Leeds

Back on topic. Yesterday's post was a bit too serious. An attempt at serious comment about a serious issue maybe, but this is supposed to be a food blog not a social commentary. I probably won't do it again. Sorry.

So, the food. I paid a visit to Red Chilli on Sunday. The Leeds branch of the Chinese mini-chain, not the Wakefield branch of the Indian mini-chain. In case you didn't already know Red Chilli is the only good Chinese restaurant in Leeds*. The focus here is on Sichuan food, although there are Cantonese dishes on the menu I've never tried them. Stick to the Sichuan dishes and you usually can't go wrong.

First up, stir fried kai lan with Chinese sundried sausage and bacon. The Sichuan food mantra is 'if in doubt, add pork'. A very sensible proposition if you ask me. I've never tried Chinese sausage or bacon before, and was quite impressed. Little chewy explosions of piggy saltiness, very nice with the crunchy, refreshing greens. Kai lan isn't my favourite green though, it's a bit tasteless.

Sliced chicken and seafood hot chilli casserole arrived next. An intensely savoury broth with loads of wobbly stuff floating around in it (definitely tofu, scallops, chicken and squid. God knows what else). Disappointingly it wasn't spicy though.

The final huge dish to arrive, a Sichuan classic. Dan Dan noodles with minced pork and chilli in soup. A sort of Chinese Spag Bol if you will. Except usually better. Think perfectly cooked noodles and morsels of fatty pork swimming in a rich, meaty broth agressively spiced with copious quantities of Sichuan pepper and chilli. The best versions of this will make your tongue tingle and your brow sweat, but you won't be able to stop shovelling it in. This was a decent version, BUT NOT SPICY ENOUGH. Way underpowered.

For good measure, a plate of dumplings. Beijing style minced pork and mince king prawn dumplings to be precise. Good wrappers, steamed to perfection with a nice fresh filling. Delicious dunked in the black vinegar provided.

Yes we did order all this for two people. No we didn't finish it all, but did take the rest away. They'll happily package up your leftovers. With rice, tea and a proper tip for the sweet service the bill came to £38. Outstanding value considering that this was really a meal for three, not two.

My one criticism of Red Chilli is their inconsistency with the spicing. I've been to the Leeds branch three times now, and the original Manchester branch twice, and it's never quite the same. If it's supposed to be a facemelter of a dish, then make it so. Don't tone things down unless we ask you to. Otherwise I love it.

7/10 on this visit

6 Great George Street
Leeds
LS1 3DW


http://www.redchillirestaurant.co.uk/leeds_gallery.asp

*This bold statement may not be true. A big thumbs-up to anyone who can prove it to be false.