Friday 28 May 2021
When Chinese food started to become mainstream in the UK in the middle of the twentieth century, it was a minor revolution, introducing incredibly new and interesting flavours and styles of cooking into the slightly drab world of post-war British cooking. Something like that revolution has been happening again in the last couple of decades, as a new generation of Chinese chefs has taken their place in the nation s restaurants, moving us away from the uniformity of Anglicised Cantonese cuisine and into a new world of regional styles and rich authenticity. Restaurants like Barshu, Xi’an Impression, Xu and A. Wong have made the possibilities of Chinese cooking come alive – a far cry from the Cantonese takeaways we grew up with, however comforting and familiar they may be. But what if those classics could be revisited, enlivened, and made exciting again? That s exactly what s happened at Red Duck in south London.