Chop Chop
43 Mitchell Street, Glasgow
0141 221 9799
Lunch/Dinner £16-22
Food rating 8/10
THE new Chop Chop in Glasgow is swankier than its long-established Edinburgh counterpart. The latter is painted in the red and yellow of a Maoist propaganda poster, and it has more of a canteen feel. With its prime location in Mitchell Street, at the intimate end of the thoroughfare as it narrows, Glasgow's Chop Chop basks in the urban coolness and sense of excitement you only get in big, gritty cities. Diagonally opposite Charles Rennie MacKintosh's warm red sandstone Lighthouse, and cosseted by the tall, vertical buildings around it, Chop Chop is somehow in a quiet backwater, yet dead central. And as it now offers free parking in the expensive, but bijou, car park next door if you spend over £40, it seems unlikely that this new arrival on the Glaswegian dining scene will stay a secret for long.
The interior is up-market too. Soft, washy golden-yellow walls, mauve-tinted lighting and ivory furniture create a quietly opulent mood. You can dine under flowering cherry trees - fake, of course, but plausible fakes, just like the pretend bamboo. Cherry blossom is such a Japanese thing. Go to Kyoto or Tokyo next month, and you'll see crowds picnicking under the trees as the pink blossoms blow in the breeze, but I'm told that the Chinese are big into the beautiful "sakura" also. And come to think of it, I have noticed those pink blossomy twigs peeping out from Chinese art, behind all the pandas and pagodas.
The tables at Chop Chop are set with paper mats covered in Chinese cultural miscellany. Did you know, for instance that a new skyscraper is built in China every five days? A disturbing thought. Or how about the saying: "A person without a smiling face should not open a shop"? This is a sentiment that is clearly equally applicable to restaurateurs, of course, and it bears repetition.
Chop Chop is not the usual Sino-Scottish gastronomic compromise. Owner Jian Wang comes from Changchun in north-eastern China, a region famous for its dumplings. Diners leery of MSG and the extensive armoury of chemical additives in many Chinese products can relax a bit here: Chop Chop guarantees that "we make the noodles, dumplings and all the other dishes ourselves from fresh ingredients with no artificial colourings or preservatives".
So, no "Chinese restaurant hangover syndrome" here.
Among my favourite things at Chop Chop are the clear soups, either hot and sour, or lamb. You might have noticed that "bone broth" has become desperately trendy of late, not least because it has been taken under the wing of the photogenic Hemsley sisters for its cure-all capacity and micro-nutrient richness. But that's no reason to be cynical; there's no need to sniff at a clear, pure, restorative broth. And our lamb one was all I had hoped for, crystal-clear, aromatically muttony, soothing, and thoroughly appetite-enhancing, without any help from the men in white coats in the food lab.
Unlike the more commonly encountered Cantonese cuisine, there's something quite plain about some of the dishes here. If you're looking for high-tone seasonings, you won't find them; this is spring onion, ginger, garlic and chilli territory. So the homemade dumplings, served either boiled (Jiao Zi), or fried (Guo Tie), have homely mellow fillings (prawn, chilli beef, pork and Chinese leaves), although you can jazz them up with your own mix of soy, rice vinegar, chilli oil, and minced garlic. If you want to bring up your kids to have a cosmopolitan palate, then a plate of 12 pork and coriander mini dumplings, only £1.70, would be a good place to start.
I particularly like the plump, boiled rice noodles (Miantiao) that come with matchsticks of cucumber in a mustard and peanut sauce, and prefer the coley in its earthy black bean sauce to the crispy squid, which is a bit too close in texture to Wotsits for my taste. Pricing is erratic. Crispy shredded potato costs £5.50; spicy fried potato, £7.70. Still, this is a fun place - trolley service operates during peak lunchtime banquets - and as always with Asian food, the more people around the table, the merrier.
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