Super slick, super cooking, super bills

10 April 2012

Twenty-four hours' notice is required if you want to sample 'monk jumps over the wall', a serious soup made with abalone and one that attracts a near-three-figure price tag.

This dish rather sets the tone for Hakkasan, which is a very superior kind of Chinese restaurant.

The décor is slick (as you would expect when the design budget was a reputed £3,000,000).

The double-smart cocktail bar is consistently and fashionably crammed.

Top-name designers from the worlds of film and fashion have given their all, and this is a smart and elegant place.

The food is novel, well presented, fresh, delicious and, in strangely justifiable fashion, expensive.

The starters are called 'small eat' and do not shy away from expensive luxury ingredients.

The three-style vegetarian roll teams a mooli spring roll with a bean curd puff and a yam roll.

Live native lobster, plus noodles with ginger and spring onion, cannot be many people's idea of a 'small eat'.

Or there is grilled Shanghai dumpling.

The main dishes are innovative and delicious.

Try baked silver cod with Chinese rice wine, or the stir-fry scallop and prawn cake with choi sum.

There's also jasmine tea-smoked chicken and sweet-and-sour organic pork with pomegranate.

By way of a staple, try the stir-fry glass vermicelli, which enlivens noodles with chicken, crabmeat and fried shallots.

The dim sum (served only at lunchtime) are not cheap, but they are very good - prawn puff and sesame prawn toast are exceptional.

Whisper it: 'These are better dim sum than you'll find in Chinatown!'

Hakkasan
Hanway Place, London, W1T 1HD

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