Restaurant review: Cha Kee, SW6 / Mountain, W1

The wobbly bits

As I write, highly gelatinous bits of beef tendon are flying through my small intestine, trying to kill me.

Cha Kee’s beef brisket noodle soup has done this to me. It is responsible. I am currently sitting upright on my mum’s sofa, resisting every mental urge to go horizontal lest it all come back up. What a great lunch though.

Cha Kee is a new Hong Kong Cantonese restaurant inside a market on the North End Road in Fulham. It serves excellent food in volumes that are intended to sedate you, rather than satiate. I got excited and over-ordered because there is now somewhere I would regularly eat in Fulham. I can say the following because I have lived in Fulham for more than 80 per cent of my life. The residents of Fulham do not know how to eat. I cannot think of any worse part of town to go for dinner in. My current area of Finsbury Park feels like San Sebastian compared to Fulham.

I am of course loathing my own kind. I am disparaging the eating habits of Fulham with the taste-signalling venom only an insider could muster. But they really, really do not know what they’re doing. There’s a chunk of real estate right by Parsons Green station, one of the most pleasant parts of London. It could be a proper destination spot, right by the green, right by the tube. And yet, it is a ‘Megan’s’. It serves disgusting ‘deconstructed’ dry chicken shawarmas, but it is considered OK because there are pretty flowers on the walls. Perhaps this state of affairs is because Fulham sits in the shadow of the River Café. It lurks there, by the Thames, by the edge of the borough, standing plain as a wardrobe, checking that no one nearby gets any bright ideas.

Cha Kee has snuck in though, because there’s not much sign to the outside world that it exists. It is hidden right at the back of a market. It seats twelve people. It is here because of Boris Johnson. When China introduced the national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, Boris made three million Hong Kongers eligible for citizenship. Five years later, many have come, and settled, and some of them evidently opened Cha Kee.

The tables next to me all seemed to be getting the ‘Hong Kong French toast’: a garish, sweet-looking mountain of fried milk bread covered in peanut butter, which I don’t like the sound of and I think sounds like it is for children. Instead, I got the beef brisket noodle soup, adding supplementary tendon, because my fellow Fulham friend Lucas had dared me to do it after he’d been in a week earlier.

Lucas and I share an affinity for tête de veau, a particularly polarising French dish of poached calf’s head and tongue, all lip-smacking and wobbly. The brisket meat in the soup did remind me of TDV: it was tender and flaky. The soup itself was brilliantly earthy and brilliantly collagenic.

The tendons had made Lucas struggle, he said, and I started eating them and thought ‘hah, moron, this is easy’. If you break them down with your chopsticks so that they coat the noodles, it does add a nice sticky element to the dish. But don’t do what I then did, and get ahead of yourself, and pick up a big hunk of tendon with your chopsticks, and just eat it in one, because if you do, you will feel an instinctive revulsion, which feels hardwired from thousands of years of evolutionary psychology, a deep feeling that this is disgusting and that you should not eat this and that this might even hurt you. I got it down my throat with the same steeliness of doing a shot of tequila without lime: my brain just going ‘right, do it, go, now!!!’

Sesame prawn toast came too. Sesame prawn toast is amazing. If I could advertise the works of humanity to aliens, prawn toast would probably be in the capsule. King Lear, Abbey Road, ‘Kevin De Bruyne BEST ASSISTS 2015-2025’, and some sesame prawn toast. And it’s hard to believe it could be done better than they do it here: plump, juicy prawns with some bite, laid on top of bread so charmingly and gently fried that it crackled like the shell of a toffee apple.

I also went to Mountain for lunch alone yesterday. Mountain has a certain arrogance to it which I just love. The first time I went, we ordered eight or nine dishes, and our waitress said ‘just fish and meat, eh?’ And we said, ‘Yes that is right’. And she went ‘are you sure you don’t want any rice?’ And we said ‘no, we’re OK without rice, thank you’. And she went ‘our rice is really good, are you sure?’ And we went ‘yes, don’t worry’. And then she came back ten minutes later and said ‘sorry, I don’t know how, but I accidentally put a rice order through for your table – it’ll come but we’ll remove it from the bill’. We felt like we’d been judged for our imbalanced ordering, judged hard, and were being politely shown how things were done.

When I went in yesterday, the waiter saw I had a book under my arm. ‘What are you reading?’, he said. I showed him that it was Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. He chuckled and said ‘of course’, and showed me to the table. Felt seen.

The first time I went, we stuck mostly to the live fire part of the menu, having some fatty mutton chops, as well as some particularly memorable beef sweetbreads, in which a new flavour revealed itself with every chew. Cured dairy beef this time round came from a very old Spanish ex dairy cow, and was pretty funky and lovingly painted in syrup-y olive oil. I folded it up and put it inside their unbelievably delicious grilled bread, with raw cow’s milk butter compounding the atheroscleroticness of it all. Great. I then had the dish I wanted to order last time but no one let me: what they have on the menu as simply ‘tripe’.

And that ‘tripe’ stew is one of the great London restaurant dishes. It was the first dish that chef Tomos Parry put on the Mountain menu, and it’s done in the Basque way: braised for several days, with pimentón (Spanish paprika) providing most of the flavour of the sauce, bolstered by the unctuous presence of trotters, tempered by some vinegar, and then adorned with two different parts of the cow’s stomach. Pleasingly peppery and utterly delicious.

The initial plan for this week’s instalment was to review FM Mangal in Camberwell, which I went to on Friday night. I had some meze and a lamb beyti. And I can’t write about that because you know what it was like already. It was a 7/10, because all Turkish restaurants are a 7/10. Your homework is to tell me about one that’s not.

Oh, and finally, look at this lovely ox cheek pappardelle I had at the Eagle on Friday, for £11. Never stop going to the Eagle.