Sitting on a stool at the bar in Hang Dai, it’s difficult not to wish that you might somehow have aged just as well as this funky, Kandinsky-candy-coloured room has aged, over the almost-ten years of its existence.
It’s a Thursday evening, late, and the room is jammers, everyone enjoying the curious feeling of perpetual-present that Hang Dai has always exuded. Outside is Camden Street, but inside is a Wong Kar-Wai movie in pungent technicolour, and if Maggie Cheung or Tony Leung walked in – wearing shades, of course – no one would bat an eye.
Almost a decade after creating a new paradigm for modern Chinese cooking, and far-out design, the creators of Hang Dai have been back in the news of late. Music fanatic Will Dempsey has newly opened Hawker, up on the Rathgar Road, offering Chinese street food for take-away.
Karl Whelan, the original HD head chef, will soon be opening up a new room – Marée – in the refurbed Bolands Mills. So, it seemed a good moment to snap up a 9pm booking at the bar and see what is cooking in Hang Dai.
Our waiter advised us to order 1-2-1 from the single page menu: one small bite to begin which meant it had to be the cheeseburger spring roll with Sichuan ketchup, as the alternative Oscietra caviar is more than a little beyond our financial wherewithal.
From the starters we plumped for double-fried crispy aubergine with sweet soy and ginger, and pork dumplings with sweet soy and chilli oil. For the main course, Mapo Tofu with minced pork promised just the sort of soul-satisfying grub we needed at the end of a long day which had begun way out west in Westport, County Mayo. Dry-fried green beans with minced pork and chilli, and some boiled rice would do nicely as the balast.
The cheeseburger spring roll first appeared on the menu at Hawker when that was a pandemic pop-up to feed the HD faithful, with a counter and a few tables outside on Camden Street. The idea was later extrapolated by Big Fan, who created a Wagyu cheeseburger jiaozi, so there is clearly a public hankering for this fusion of the Oriental staple with Western fast food vibes. These were rather more cheeseburger than spring roll.
The crispy aubergine came in a puddle of soy and was nicely crispy, although the aubergine was scant on flavour. The dumplings, like the spring rolls, were a starchy production, with the pork rather mute in flavour.
The mapo tofu pushed the fusion boat out into the deep. The dish, traditionally a slinky stew – emphasis on the word stew – of silken tofu in a beef or pork sauce made electric by fermented chili bean paste and Sichuan peppercorns, has been described by J. Kenji Lopez Alt as “My favourite dish in the world and the grandmother of Sichuan cuisine.” It’s a totemic dish, which we first ate at the original China-Sichuan Restaurant when it was trailblazing echt Chinese food in Stillorgan, back in the 1980s. When we asked the waiter for chopsticks to eat the dish, he replied “Well, that’s a first!”
The HD version substitutes the cubes of silken tofu and, in their place, opts for a single slab of tofu festooned with scallions and sesame seeds, surrounded by the pork sauce. If it seemed like a good idea to serve it as if it were a vegan steak, or a baked hunk of feta, the reality was that the centre of the tofu was cold, the pork sauce had too much cornflour slush, and there was no expected numbing-hot heat from the chilli paste and peppercorns. The dish was about as far from Mapo Tofu as it’s possible to travel. Fusion howareya!
We’re not gone on the fusion riffing but, sitting at the bar, sipping a glass of pecorino in the rouge light of the room, listening to Was Not Was on Toby Hatchett speakers, still makes for a fun evening.
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Sounds good and great wine choice 😀