Hold the chop suey: British fans of Chinese cuisine can now eat, and cook, the real thing

Gloopy sweet and sour pork, chicken chop suey and fried rice were once Chinese dishes of choice in Britain. Fortunately, places serving these poorly made versions of Cantonese classics – and Western inventions – are now being rivalled by restaurants dishing up the best of China’s regional cuisines.

It’s a development that has been fostered by the rising number of people from China visiting the country and also Britons’ expanding food horizons.

British-born Chinese foodie David Chan, who lives in the county of Norfolk in eastern England, regularly visits the Norwich restaurant Baby Buddha. The quality of the dim sum is as good as almost any he tried in Hong Kong, he says. The nearby University of East Anglia has a large population of students from China, who are the restaurant’s core clientele.

A walk around London’s Chinatown finds supermarkets selling far more fresh Chinese vegetables than 20 years ago, and restaurants with more wide-ranging menus alongside the more usual Cantonese fare, often including Hunan and Sichuan dishes – China’s hottest cuisines in terms of trend and flavour.

Writer and cook Fuschia Dunlop, who speaks fluent Putonghua and learned cooking in China, says this is largely due to an influx of students, businesspeople and tourists from China hungry for hometown cuisines.

The menu at Oriental Dragon is typical of the new offerings in the British capital’s Chinatown – sweet and sour pork sits alongside Hunanese smoked pork and dried radish. As Dunlop explains, the Hunanese are well known for their cured and smoked meats, and these have caught on in Britain.