Dim sum to dye for

I’ve written about The Big Light many times. It’s something I usually consider unique to Italy, where unless you’ve scored a reservation at one of the few places with good light, usually bathed in the glow of numerous Michelin stars, you’ll find yourself at an abysmally lit table with excellent wine and food. They so love that overhead Big Light in Italy, but after visiting Banquet 88 the other evening I realised that it’s an international phenomenon. It’s as Chinese as it is European. And the glaring brightness of Banquet 88 makes it as authentic as any dining room in Guangzhou. This isn’t a place for a first date or to linger for hours, it’s a big and breezy spot to binge on dumplings. It’s also based, somewhat improbably, in a high concept purpose-built neighbourhood in Docklands populated mostly by Slug & Lettuces and Côtes. That someone would open something so authentic and interesting here gives me hope for the city. It’s like a daisy growing through cracks in concrete.

I was compelled to visit by one of Marina O’Loughlin’s Instagram posts, with a beguiling photograph of a sculpture of pork belly stuffed with “a dizzyingly umami mulch of mustard greens”. The lady nailed it. What a dish. This is Devils Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind rendered in lush fatty pig tummy with all kinds of deliciousness inside. It’s definitely a dish to share in every sense. While there are plenty of tables for two here, you need to bring the whole family. There’s too much to take in and you need to order lots of it, even if you might need to wear shades while here.

I did Banquet 88 all wrong. I turned up hungry and devoured baskets of har gau and siu mai, which were fine, and then a more interesting, steamed trio of cuttlefish and crab dumplings and some wagyu pastry puffs. The dim sum here is good, but then most dim sum in London is dire. I won’t queue for either of those places in Kings Cross, and I don’t have A. Wong budget on the regular. Pretty much everywhere in Chinatown is serving defrosted supermarket dumplings at an astounding mark-up. We need more places like this – solid, reasonable, with a few offbeat options among the standards.

I’d come back to Banquet 88 in a heartbeat for the core competencies of dumplings, but that’s not really the point of the place. You come for that pork belly arrangement and the prawn with crispy red rice skin from the menu of cheung fun. I can’t begin to do justice to this dish. It lands sliced in mouthful sized little rolls, with a glossy scarlet wrapping that looks like a couture vinyl fetish accessory. The texture is everything – the crunch of the skin and the prawn inside… Heaven. Such a shame this came after I’d filled up on those dumplings. This cheung fun is reason enough to brave St Katharines Docks (“central London’s only marina”). By the time the pork belly arrived I was done, but soldiered on as best I could, trying to persuade my dining companion to eat as much as possible so I could enjoy the dish vicariously. When I go back in the next couple of weeks I’ll do things differently. I’ll come hungry, with a crew, and pace myself. And we’ll sit outside where the light is a little kinder. It’s one thing to have Instagram-friendly bulbs but it’s not flattering to unfiltered faces. C

Banquet 88
Unit 2 Commodity Quay, London E1W 1AZ
020 3951 4389; banquet88.com