Food review: The art of real Chinese food

Few towns and villages aren’t within reach of a half-decent Chinese takeaway. And with food from the Far East so prevalent on our high streets and in our supermarket ready-meal aisles, there’s a pretty obvious question to ask when it comes to ordering by post – why bother?

The answer is provided by the award-winning Lu Ban, a popular restaurant that’s moved into the booming home delivery market.

The restaurant is based in Liverpool and features TV-friendly chef, Dave Critchley, who we’ll no doubt see more of soon on our TV screens.

Featured in The Telegraph, Metro and much-loved on social media, Lu Ban’s home delivery service provides people with the opportunity to enjoy authentic Chinese food at home while we remain in partial lockdown.

The offer is pretty simple. Using fine ingredients and preparation methods, your complete dishes are prepared in the Lu Ban kitchen by chefs so that they are ready for you to heat and eat at home.

Delivered to your door in packaging made specially for transporting food by courier, your fresh food will remain chilled for 24 hours from dispatch, allowing you time to be able to refrigerate for up to three days before use. Each dish comes with heating instructions, and you can create a feast of gorgeous high-quality Chinese food at home. Simply open, heat and enjoy.

You can even choose to upgrade your order and add Champagne, gin or cocktails for a fabulous night in, if your wallet stretches that far.

Each Heat at Home dish contains two servings and if you are looking for a complete meal, there’s a selection of main dishes and sides from which to choose.

Critchley is already something of a wok’n’roll star, when it comes to good food. He’s previously run most of Liverpool’s best restaurants though in recent years he decamped to Manchester to lead Living Ventures’ flagship Australasia. And then he got tired of the commute and was eager to take advantage of a new opportunity.

“The phone went and I got asked to come back. I just prefer it in Liverpool. I’m from the city. And that drive to Manchester doesn’t get any easier.”

So back he came. He’d started off as a kid, washing dishes in a local pub at 15. And he’d used the money he made to put himself through school, college and university.

He became an illustrator, working on children’s books, but all the time kept his hand in at restaurants.

“I was running restaurants by the age of 19. After I finished university, I drifted into the kitchen and I took my first head chef role at 23. I love it, I always have, I’ve never looked back.”

Lu Ban is a fascinating project. In non-Covid times, the restaurant opens from Thursday to Sunday, while from Monday to Wednesday students attend classes.

The restaurant menu eschews the awful western version of Chinese food, which is habitually built on sugar, salt and MSG.

Instead, he serves pickled cucumber with chilli, shitake and sea salt, or a dish of aromatic tofu with sesame paste, chilli oil, toasted black bean, black sesame and frothed soy milk. There’s no chicken chow main with egg fried rice, nor sweet and sour King prawn with fried noodles. Instead, Lu Ban customers can enjoy oysters served on ice with pickled ginger, Chinese onion, Chinkiang vinegar, soy and chilli oil or Tianjin pear with star anise, vanilla and cinnamon, air dried ham, pickled radish, ginger and chive oil.

Dave makes regular trips to China, where he learns from Master Woo at the famed Tianjin School of Cuisine. He is the only chef in the world of non-Chinese origin destined for Master Chef status.

Lu Ban has made headlines for all the right reasons. Dave even found himself on the BBC’s The One Show, much to the delight of host Gyles Brandreth.

He has already spent time in China but will go back soon to continue his education as well as attending his official inauguration into an apprenticeship. No-one from the UK has ever followed this path or had the opportunity to hone their skills to that level.

“The first visit, in August, was eye-opening. It had never happened to a Westerner before. There were seven Master Chefs, all specialising in different disciplines. So there were hot dishes, cold dishes, dumpings; the whole range.

“Part of the project is showing people the true art of Chinese food. The perfect example is a dumpling that is exclusive to the Tianjin region. Our Master Chef spent a few days teaching us the basic skills then told us it would be three months before we’d be good enough to actually serve our dumplings and three years before we’d truly mastered it. The woman who taught us was a legend; she’d been doing it for 20 years.

“Each dumpling has 23 little folds, little pleats in the top. Imagine all that work just for one dumpling. But you quickly learn that there’s a level of precision that people just don’t associate with Chinese food.”

The at-home package delivers on both flavour and value. We started with surf and turf: sweet and sour prawns followed by curried sesame chicken skewers and chilli noodles. The flavours were as refreshing as a freshly zested lime, the sauces deep and intense, the balance spot on.

A beef box featured sauces for beef in oyster sauce, a deliciously fragrant seasoning for egg fried rice and similar for Chinese-spiced greens. We bought the additional ingredients, added the sauce and stood back to admire our work.

Chinese mushrooms and pak choi were served in deliciously tender dumplings while a crisp Kao pork belly featured skin that was crunchy and light and meat that fell apart under the knife.

Finishing with roast duck and pancakes with two different sauces, we enjoyed a Lu Ban feast that was big on flavour and showcased why Lu Ban is fast emerging as one of the UK’s best Chinese. Funny thing is, ordering online was just as easy as popping to the end of the road to buy from the local takeaway – the quality, however, was something else.