It is that rare thing, the very comforting and the luxurious all in one. Follow it with the peppery hit of the sliced ginger. There is no such thing as a good cheap lobster.Īsk for extra napkins for when you pick up the shells, coated in that lightly gelatinous sauce and give in to the urge to suck the sweet meat from the shell. In any case, if anybody tells you they’ve found a cheap source of lobster, back away. It costs a hefty £55, but will feed two with room to spare. It’s copied all over the world now, but they claim creation rights and I’m not going to argue. Eventually, I decided a third, more formal visit was in order, not least to have the dish for which they are most famous: a whole lobster broken up over a pile of soft, thin noodles in a banging ginger and spring onion sauce. I accidentally fell into Mandarin Kitchen a second time within a few weeks and ordered it all again because I wasn’t reviewing and it was my money and nobody was looking. ‘All sweet, tense fillet, slipping off the frame’: Dover sole with chilli and onions. Making generalisations about the waiters in particular types of restaurants is risky, but it’s fair to say that a lot of central London’s Chinese establishments are staffed by brilliant people prized for their briskness and efficiency, rather than necessarily their warmth. There are soft banquettes and downlighters and staff who appear genuinely pleased to see you. A few years ago it had a makeover, creating a clean space of whitewashed curving vaults as if in a set of space-age railway arches. It’s still run by the next generation of the Cheung family and this year will celebrate its 45th anniversary. It first opened in 1978, a project between restaurateur Helen Li and seafood trader Stephen Cheung. In a city where restaurants come and go, Mandarin Kitchen has thrived. It’s all sweet, tense fillet, slipping off the frame, like a silk dressing gown off a comely shoulder. And oh my: the cooking of that fish was perfect. Currently it’s £38, as compared to £48 at Scott’s and £65 at Wiltons. Don’t be embarrassed about asking them what that price is, because they won’t be embarrassed to tell you. It’s listed on the menu at “market price”. No, it was the whole steamed Dover sole in ginger and spring onion that caused the stains, as I filleted it off the bone, spraying fin and sauce hither and yon.

You can get a lot of adhesion between a fat finger pad and that stuff, especially off a linen tablecloth. The salty rubble of fresh red chilli and garlic went, too. If any crumbs fell off the rustling pile of crisply battered tentacle and ring, I had ’em. It wasn’t the deep-fried baby squid with garlic and chilli. ‘A banging ginger and spring onion sauce’: lobster noodles Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

I can get my w2 from red lobster