Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 9 January 2017 issue)

Dear Kam,
We’re going to London for a holiday. How do we choose a good Chinese restaurant?
Mr Wong Kei

I’m in London at the moment and, despite the terrible exchange rate (6:1), so are a lot of other Malaysians. There are fewer Malaysians than there used to be but, at times, this truly is Kuala London.

When I used to live here back in the 1980s, I would occasionally eat at Chinese restaurants. I didn’t do it very often because the waiters were always so astonishingly rude and the food wasn’t that great. I always had the feeling that we were being served muck that the restaurant owners would never dream of eating themselves. Because I was Malaysian, my English friends assumed that I could pick the best restaurant and the best items on the menu, but I couldn’t. My English friends and I used to enjoy a dish called crispy aromatic duck and it was only when I moved to Malaysia that I discovered that it’s not a Chinese dish at all but a French one called duck confit.

In those days, before I moved back to Malaysia, I didn’t really know Chinese food, or that what Londoners think is Chinese food, is actually Cantonese cuisine, but I did know that if the waiters saw you even glance at the menu, then you would be served the same muck as everyone else.

There have been Chinese in Britain for a very long time with the port cities of London and Liverpool having the largest and oldest communities. Arriving as sailors in the early 19th century, they opened laundry businesses, rented rooms to Malay and Indian sailors (collectively known as Lascars) and, most notoriously, operated opium dens that Sherlock Holmes used to visit. These early arrivals were almost all men and many married local girls, but they were a target for anti-immigrant suspicion.

A recent archaeological dig in London discovered the graves of Chinese people from the Roman times of 2,000 years ago. Who knows how or why they made the epic journey from China to London, but it suggests that many British people might have Chinese ancestry.

The Chinese restaurants of London’s Chinatown were opened by later arrivals from the British colony of Hong Kong. Britain’s Chinese communities are very small but, as a minority group, they are the most academically and financially successful.

There is a legend handed down through generations of Malaysian students that the best roast duck in the world can be found on London’s Queensway. These days, I know I can pick the right dishes, but how do you pick the right restaurant when there are several to choose from?

First of all, don’t go to Chinatown because that muck is for the tourists. Fortunately, I was with my wife and she has an excellent food radar. If the restaurant has a lot of Chinese customers, then that’s a good sign, isn’t it?

I used to go to a restaurant in London that appeared to have a lot of Chinese customers, but the food was absolutely horrible (I found a rusty screw in one of the dishes) and I think the owner forced his family to eat there just to lure people like me into thinking it was popular.

After much deliberation, we chose a restaurant in Queensway that was packed with Chinese people, far too many to be just the owner’s family, and the man expertly chopping the duck was an old man, and I always choose the stall where the food is being prepared by an old person.

Inside the restaurant, there were only a handful of white people, and I was able to laugh at them because they were all eating crispy aromatic duck.

After my years living in Malaysia, I now have wisdom enough to arrogantly know what is authentically Chinese, but I still secretly really wanted crispy aromatic duck even though I know it’s French and the owner only put it on the menu because his Anglo patrons seem to like it. I’m sure he would serve everything with chips if he thought that’s what his customers wanted.

But these customers did not want chips. This large restaurant was packed with Chinese people hungry for the legendary Queensway roast duck. What gradually dawned on me was that I was among a peculiar crowd that perhaps could only ever be gathered together in London. The women on the table next to me were Chinese but they spoke Thai among themselves and absolutely pitch-perfect London-style English to the very polite waiters. The patrons were Chinese people from Britain, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and even mainland China. These patrons represented almost the entire Chinese diaspora whose forebears had left mostly southern China over 100 years ago when China was a murderously dangerous place to be. The people who were different were not the inconsequential Anglo patrons eating French-style duck but the Chinese from China who were speaking not in English or a Chinese dialect but in Mandarin and with the northerly Beijing accent.

I imagined that for one group, China is a distant place of dark memory, of horror and disaster that had to be escaped from, whereas for the other, it is a present-day nation of ever-ascending greatness. The two groups were as different from each other as Americans and Europeans, even if they were briefly united in a love for roast duck.

The roast duck I had in London’s Queensway was very delicious, but I’ve had much better in Malaysia.

Reprinted with the kind permission of