The Sun Kee, Belfast
IMAGINE a Chinese restaurant all the factors which make Chinese restaurants irritating - offhand service, the tumult of lacquer, the seen-it-all-before menu, the lack of culinary authenticity - were absent.
Imagine, instead, a little Chinese restaurant where they remember who you are and greet you with a bright smile and a "Hello!". A place where they listen painstakingly to awkward orders - "Can we have garlic sauce with the choi sum instead of the bak choi?" - and accommodate the sort of requests which, in other Chinese restaurants, are met with a polite, but firm, "Not possible." A Chinese restaurant where they happily open the bottles of wine you have bought yourself, and don't expect you to soldier through on Liebfraumilch and classless claret.
Imagine, finally, a Chinese eating house where the food is gloriously real and true tasting: nervy, exciting, spicy and truly delicious, a million miles away from the dull hotch-potch of HongKong-meets-Cantonese which most Chinese restaurants trade in.
You don't need to imagine the place. It exists. It's called The Sun Kee. It's in Belfast, on Donegall Pass, and in the last year, of all the restaurants in all of the country, I think the Sun Kee has been my favourite. I went first on a Sunday evening. I was back on Monday evening. I don't just like it.I love it.
I love the fact that it dispels the idea that Chinese cooking, for Irish tastes. cannot be truly authentic, for this is real food and it enjoys the glorious pairing of tastes which is the great invention of Chinese cooking. Listed amongst the special dishes on the opening page of the menu, you find the brilliant unlikeliness of dishes like monkfish with char siu, or duck stuffed with prawns, or beef flank with root vegetables.
The monkfish with char siu is a thrill. Served in a hot-pot dish, it has little clusters of deep-fried fish fighting it out with thin slices of the delectable char siu. By teaming it with the monkfish, the two propel each other into the taste stratosphere. The beef flank hotpot is one of those dishes which demonstrates a rusticity we rarely find in the bourgeois Chinese restaurants, and slow cooking had brought a tender texture to the potatoes and the turnips which were the bedfellows of the beef.
Duck stuffed with prawns is one of those dishes which proves that you either like true Chinese cooking, or you don't. That is to say, it is slithery, gloopy and squidgy, with a wobbly glaze of egg white forming a transparent film over the slices of duck and the prawn paste.
But don't allow this unusual aspect of Chinese food to deter you from trying the Sun Kee, for the assorted gaggle of folk whom we have brought to the restaurant on subsequent visits have, unanimously, praised it as the finest Chinese cooking they have eaten.
But there is even more to admire about the Sun Kee than the smashing food. It is cheap, and almost everyone else eating in the restaurant is a member of Belfast's Chinese community. The decor is happily threadbare, with a television bleating away against the side wall no matter what time of the evening it is.
The waiters bill and coo and, indeed, even kiss your baby. I am smitten. I defy you to resist it.
The China-Sichuan, Stillorgan, Co Dublin
THE sweet and sour is the barometer. This glorious dipping sauce, one of the trademarks of Chinese cooking, is either one of the best things you have ever eaten - not too sweet and sticky, not too sour and shocking - or one of the great culinary travesties of the modern age, a glop festooned with bits of pineapple which gags you with its viscosity.
It says all one needs to know about David Hui's China-Sichuan restaurant in Stillorgan that a dish you would be petrified to order elsewhere is one of the first things you order when you sit down in here.
Served with deep-fried pieces of chicken, or with monkfish, sea trout, pork fillet or prawns, the sweet and sour sauce is perfectly judged, perfectly poised, just right. And getting things just right is what they do in the China-Sichuan, for this is Chinese cooking without the cliches.
I have been eating in the restaurant for years now, and the roll-call of dishes eaten in that time shows a relentless discipline and effectiveness in the kitchen: the wonderful smoked duckling the terrific coffee-odoured thrill of the hot and sour soup, the great dumplings with a spicy chilli sauce or perhaps a dense black dipping sauce; the exciting tangle of tastes in the monkfish with cashews; the great simplicity of some stir-fried bak choi; the intensity of flavour of the fried shredded pork fillet with garlic sauce; the cooling delight of the almond bean curd. It has never been anything other than great cooking.
Aside from the charm of the food, the great benefit of being a regular at the China-Sichuan - and this is a Chinese restaurant with very many regular customers - is the fact that getting to know Tim, the delightful waiter, and his colleagues, can allow you to step outside the menu.
The dish of braised hot and spicy bean curd, for example, is one of their vegetarian specialities, but, if asked, they will also serve this with finely chopped beef and a dressing of coriander, a version which is closer in tone to the classic dish. Both are terrific, but the willingness of the kitchen to improvise and invent for you is one of the unique things about the China-Sichuan. On occasion, we have even left the ordering of the dishes up to the kitchen, and always been delighted with their choice.
Allied to the trueness and the variety of tastes in all the dishes, it makes the China-Sichuan the most addictive Chinese restaurant in Dublin. It's not entirely cliche free, of course, for the design and decor are straight out of the 1970s; but with food this good, you only have eyes for the next dish coming to the table.