Ho Wong
82 York Street, Glasgow
0141 221 3550
Lunch/Dinner: £12.80-£40
Food rating: 9/10
SO often there are constraints when we choose a restaurant. It must be open on a Monday for pre-theatre dining. There must be disabled parking. Someone in the party is a vegan. Children are welcome. It has to be in walking distance from a fixed point. You want be able to hear what the person across the table says. (That’s a tough one.)
In this instance, I need to find a restaurant that’s near Central Station in Glasgow, one that’s good for someone with a dairy allergy. We end up at the veteran Ho Wong; Asian food means escape from dairy. Lactose intolerance – the inability to digest the sugar in milk – is common among Chinese people.
But I haven’t been to the Ho Wong for a decade, so I don’t know what to expect. It always used to be excellent, but 10 years must have seen an ebb and flow of chefs. Staying on top takes stamina. The place feels so familiar as we walk in. I’d swear that the decor hasn’t changed since my last visit, although that suggests decrepitude, and on the contrary, Ho Wong still feels like a well-tended enterprise. In one respect it reminds me of the blue mansion of Cheong Fatt Tze (the Chinese Rockefeller) in Georgetown, Penang. Its front door follows Feng Shui principles to keep out evil spirits, so you can’t walk in directly on the same level as the street, and the way from there to the inner sanctum is indirect. Ho Wong’s entrance opens onto a bipartite bar, which in turns leads up to the dining room. If it does indeed retain the same decor, then whoever chose it did well. That classic pairing of soft gold raw silk with imperial red and teak-coloured wood is timeless. The light is low; the mood is calm. I could live without the hotel foyer musak, but I’m soon distracted from that by what’s coming out the kitchen.
West Lake beef soup, a pleasurably glutinous, mouth-coating broth with added heft from egg drop “flowers” and finely chopped beef that’s as silky and al dente as pasta, is exactly the sort of sustenance I crave when I’m ill. The taste is plain and nourishing. Each spoonful seems to grow the appetite, not dull it. Six large Ha Kau steamed prawn-plump dumplings look drop-dead gorgeous inside their sticky, half-moon rice wrappers that are ridged like shells. Surprisingly, their terra cotta chilli sauce doesn’t overwhelm them. Five Wor Teap dumplings, too large to eat in one mouthful, are almost bursting open with succulent minced pork. Their wrappers taste like steamed suet pastry. We dip them in red vinegar made from fermented rice, which has slivers of ginger in it. A simple idea I’ll copy at home.
The waft of the lemon sole in chilli and salt makes my mouth water. It’s strewn with a fistful of rings of fried green and red chilli. Its crisp salty batter seems so impressively dry despite being deep-fried that I wonder if it would even leave an oily trace on a napkin. It costs £18.90, but there are two lemon sole fillets in this portion. There’s not a trace of bottled gloop about the black bean sauce that coats our beautifully prepared monkfish. The small beans, supercharged depositories of salty, treacle, peat, liquorice, even carob-like flavours are suspended in a 3-D brown sauce that’s umami to its core. Is it just me, or is there a passing hint of curry spices as the Singapore noodles arrive at the table? Fine threads, but each one separate, they look unremarkable but have a taste about them that makes you want to come back for more; the addictive perfume of a well-seasoned wok.
Vegetarian dishes are inexplicably overpriced at the Ho Wong. Our “side portion” of choi sum, simply steamed with garlic, is a very poor deal for £9.50. Desserts are tokenistic and best ignored. Overall though, Ho Wong is reasonably priced and best value for groups of four or more. If I go back in 10 years, will it have changed at all? Perhaps not, but that’s fine by me.
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