The Hunan Man, London: ‘The best Chongqing chicken I have ever had’ – restaurant review

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

The Hunan Man, 45 Grafton Way, London W1T 5DQ. Starters £3.80-£13.80, large dishes £11.80-£36.80, desserts £3.80- £10.80, wines from £27, Tiger beer £4.60

A trip to the website for the Hunan Man, a thigh-slapping, salt and chilli-boosted Chinese restaurant that opened recently near London’s Goodge Street, is a thrilling journey back to the glory days of dial-up internet. Helpfully, the restaurant has uploaded the entirety of its Technicolor pic-splattered menu to the website. Less helpfully, it’s so image-dense, so florid and blazing, that it freezes up on my desktop. Suddenly, from the dank mists of the late 90s arise memories of trying to scroll through websites over-engineered for the Information Country Lane by which most of us accessed them. Squinting as an image revealed itself pixel by pixel could be an infuriating business. And no, I’m not talking about that sort of website. For God’s sake, people. Really!

Mind you, when the menu finally does reveal itself, there’s a lot that some of us will find overtly stimulating in a profoundly adult way. For a long while there was a sneery objection in food circles to menus bearing photographs of the food. How terribly unsophisticated. Surely those are for ignorant schmucks who can’t read. Actually, yes, because poverty and low literacy levels have historically ridden together in many parts of the world and these image-heavy menus are its legacy. I may well have rolled my eyes with the worst of them.

But we can all educate ourselves. Confronted with menus for Chinese restaurants celebrating the food of perhaps less-explored provinces, where pictures are very much a part of the deal, sneering is quickly replaced by drooling. Look at the red of those chopped and salted chillies enrobing that steamed fish. And, oh, how deliciously does the melting, crisped fat on those lamb ribs with cumin seem to glisten. Happily, the dishes coming out of the kitchen here, run by veteran Hunanese chef, JianRen Zhou, look just as good on the white-clothed tables as they do in the pictures. They are as boisterous as the huge, garish paintings of Chinese landscapes on the walls of the compact dining room, with its cream banquettes and blond wood floors.

This parade of shiny, glossy, fragrant things draws on the traditions not just of Hunan, but also Sichuan and, albeit briefly, Guangdong provinces. According to Fuchsia Dunlop, who knows one Chinese culinary tradition from another, Hunanese food is distinct from that of Sichuan for favouring what she has described as “bold savoury tastes, chilli-hot tastes and sour-hot tastes”. Eating here, I quickly find such distinctions fading from view. I simply get swept up in the drama. The drunken peanuts, so named because they’re to accompany booze rather than because they’re totally bladdered, come crusted with salt, chilli and the happy tongue-buzz of Sichuan peppercorns, so that one offers its own clues. Others, less so. The version of cucumber salad here comes with meaty folds of tofu and generous puddles of a dark, garlicky, lightly sour dressing that we end up slurping from our bowls, as if it’s a restorative.

Be aware. There’s little here for your scared friends: a bit of crispy duck, a few ivory-skinned dumplings, some sweet and sour tucked away in the small print. In the search for the familiar, they will flick through the menu with ever rising panic. They will pass the boiled beef in sizzling chilli oil and the pig intestines offered three ways, until they reach the shot of the Dry Wok Duck Braised in Beer, complete with head and bill. Then they will have a panic attack. Leave those people at home.

Crab is offered various ways, including with golden dunes of crushed and deep-fried garlic which, in the picture, tumble down upon it as if in a sandstorm, until only a claw peeks out, much like the Statue of Liberty’s torch at the end of the original Planet of the Apes. That looks messy, so we have it “Hunan style” in a “hot, fragrant and salty-chilli” sauce. It is equally messy. Quickly, the napkins and finger bowls fill our table. We give ourselves to the mess. It is a little like crab with ginger and spring onion, only with repeated jabs of bold and friendly heat. We suck the shells clean.

The lamb with cumin is its picture brought to life. Here are ribs, first slow-cooked, then fried until crisp and crunchy, and pulling away from the bone easily with chopsticks. They are crusted in spice and completely involving. An innocent-sounding dish of stir-fried beef with pickled white peppers is dark and brooding. The beef is like a soft, pliable biltong, the flavour earthy and deep as if it is a concentrated version of itself. As she clears the dishes away our waitress says casually that she thought we would order the diced chicken with chilli peppers. So we do. It is the best version of Chongqing chicken I have ever had the good fortune to try, the marinated thigh chopped into small pieces and deep-fried until shatteringly crisp, then pelted with ground Sichuan peppercorns. It is offered up in rustling heaps of dry red chillies, there to be picked through rather than eaten. Order the rice with finely chopped salted red chillies to go with this. Get a few more napkins. Sit back and enjoy the endorphin rush. You’ve earned it.

The impression I’ve given here is that I am up for all and anything. Bring it on. More is more, and so on. Not quite, though it is never the heat or the wobblier inner bits of animal on such menus that I find challenging. It’s always about texture. There is a way here with “glutinous” rice, pounded and turned into dumplings both savoury and sweet and then fried, which I find thudding. Others may like it. There’s also a dessert of mini rice balls in sweet rice wine, which is delivered to us as an unrefusable reward for our apparent enthusiasm. It is a hot gelatinous soup, thickened with egg white, which is extremely sweet and shockingly boozy. We are told it is “good for the digestion”, as if they think we might need the help. It is too much of too many things I wasn’t expecting. It is barely started, let alone finished. But that makes me love the Hunan Man more, not less. The menu has uncompromising depths that need to be explored. My only mistake was to visit with just one other person. This place needs multiple willing mouths. It needs a gang. Find some friends.

News bites

Eat Well MCR, the not-for-profit organisation that has distributed more than 100,000 meals to vulnerable people across Manchester since May 2020, is staging a photography exhibition celebrating the chefs involved with the project. The images, shot in the kitchens of restaurants across the city, including Wood, Erst and Ramona/Firehouse, will be on display and to buy at the restaurant 10 Tib Lane, 15-29 January. Proceeds from sales will go towards funding the service. At eatwellmcr.org.

It’s been a dispiriting start to 2024 with a series of high-profile closures. In Didsbury, chef Simon Rimmer has closed Greens after 33 years, citing a 35% rent increase on top of other rising costs. ‘It’s a heartbreaking day,’ Rimmer said, breaking the news. A second Greens in Sale, which opened in 2022, is still very much open. In London’s Blackheath, former MasterChef finalist Tony Rodd announced the closure of Copper & Ink, again citing untenable costs. And in Beverley, East Yorkshire, chef James Alcock has closed his bistro the Pig & Whistle, again citing energy costs, and the impact of Covid debt. It was, he said ‘the most gut-wrenching decision’ of his life.

Finally, news of one more closure, but for a more positive reason. Self-taught chef James Close has announced the shuttering of his two Michelin-star restaurant Raby Hunt in County Durham. However, this time it’s because he’s moving operations to Rockliffe Hall, a country house hotel in nearby Darlington. Along with his wife, Maria, he will oversee the hotel’s food offering. Later this year, he will open a new signature restaurant at the property.

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