Banquet 88 occupies the far end of St Katharine Docks in east London, set between a Zizzi, a Côte and a Slug & Lettuce in the tourist quarter beside the Tower of London. The Chinese restaurant, part of the Good Fortune Club group, holds 140 seats, with a second sizable dining room upstairs and a 50-person private room that has yet to find much of an audience.
The frontage is sedate and the interior sparse and functional, with no chintz, no modernism and not much concession to comfort. What the menu lacks in spice-bag chips and Mateus rosé it makes up for in sake cherry foie gras, egg tofu with spicy pork floss and bottles of Fei Tswei Magma chardonnay from Ningxia. The kitchen would clearly like guests to arrive in numbers and work through dishes such as baby cabbage salad with Jinhua ham and century eggs, or Teochew-style poached fish with caviar.
With rooms this size, the restaurant is especially suited to parties of six or more in the market for black truffle abalone siu mai, Wagyu beef thousand-layer pastry, XO turnip cake and deep-fried taro croquettes with caviar. It also reads as a restaurant waiting for the Chinese embassy to move into the Royal Mint across the road, a site Beijing bought for £255m, should those plans survive the courts. That, presumably, is when the private dining room would finally come into its own.
Grace Dent arrived alone for lunch, one small woman with limited stomach capacity facing a list of roughly 200 dishes. She braced herself to be parked beside the cleaning supplies cupboard; instead the staff treated her like an off-duty empress and seated her at a vast table overlooking the marina, where she studied the dim sum list while playing Scrabble on her phone with a stranger in Missouri.
That list runs to black sesame egg yolk custard buns, the sort that ooze molten salted yolk at the first bite, along with chicken feet with taro in black bean sauce and morel mushroom jade siu mai. The cooking leans Cantonese but wanders through Sichuan, Shanghai, Teochew and Beijing, with a sprinkling of Malaysia and Vietnam in the shape of satay chicken skewers and pork and prawn spring rolls.
Vegetarian dumplings wrapped in dragonfruit arrived on perforated paper in a pretty, yellow-rimmed bamboo steamer. Pink, puckered and almost translucent, they were filled with a mulchy mix of cabbage, daikon and herbs and served with a deep-red Sichuan-style chili dip. Dent found them earthy, slightly bitter and gelatinous, and hugely satisfying.
Next came hot-and-sour sesame eggplant from the appetizer menu, in a scalloped white bowl: sliced eggplant in the lightest tempura batter, deep-fried and smothered in sesame-rich heat, scattered with black and white sesame seeds and a tangle of spring onion. Sweet, rich, fiery and moreish, by Dent’s account.
A bowl of the house signature pickled radish looked as though it had been steeped in sparkling guava juice. Arranged in uniform, Jenga-like blocks, it was crunchy, fresh and heavily perfumed.
The mapo tofu came gloriously red, with ground beef and more Sichuan fire. The tofu was soft and silky and the sauce numbing and fiery, with a pleasant rolling burr of heat. The server had hesitated when the order went in. “Are you sure you want that?” he asked, searching for the right word before settling on: “It is hot.” Dent had been thinking about the mouthfeel. Wobbly? she offered. “Slimy, I guess?” he replied, but too hot and too slimy — British people don’t like it, in his view. She ate it contentedly with a basket of steamed rice and more of the turbo-sweet radish.
Around her sat academic-looking British men with Chinese wives, along with large tables of tour groups fresh from the Tower of London, perhaps reflecting on the historical torture and the sad tale of the polar bears once kept captive there.
Main courses run from the familiar roast trio of duck, crispy pork and char siu pork to the less widely served claypot chicken with black truffle and abalone.
Pudding was mango and pomelo sago, served in a tiny flower-shaped glass bowl with a gold rim. Elegant flecks of pink pomelo floated among the sago, and it proved an unexpected total delight: not too heavy, just a small treat of sugary, tropical joy.
On the way out, Dent noticed that Banquet 88 opens on Christmas Day — fabulous, in her view, for anyone who cannot face putting a turkey in the oven and would rather have dim sum instead, perhaps with a glass or two of champagne and a round of custard buns to finish.
For now the restaurant is vast and waiting to be populated. Dent was more than happy to have made a start.
Banquet 88, Unit 2, Commodity Quay, London E1; 020-3951 4389. Open all week, noon–10pm. About £40 a head à la carte; set menus £38–68, both plus drinks and service.