Gigi Gao is her own special creation and what a wonderful creation she is. She serves us wearing a full-length, silver, form-fitting dress with sequins and a veil of gold tassels. It becomes clear, when it comes to the house wine, that this is a fashion choice, not a cultural one. on the special label of the wine bottle she is depicted, uncovered, raising a glass. Another waiter is in a rainbow sequined dress and a third has a black sequined dress with a dashing opera cape. Rightly so, they pair these outfits with sensible looking trainers. The great thing about this whole outfit is that it matches the decor. They are the best kind of nuts. The floors and many of the walls are painted tangerine orange, except for those pieces that are decorated with enlarged images from the Willow design, among many others. The ceiling is strung with fairy lights and wide bolts of red sheer fabric. In one corner there is a huge, soft panda and in another a small deer. The stuffed animal looks scared. I can pretty much see why. For no apparent reason, the silver hood that says “Happy 50th Birthday” is wedged against the side of our dining room. Oh well. At some point it will be 50th. Tablecloths, under thick, transparent protectors that your bare arms might later get stuck to, are decorated with Chinese stories and legends, and wine is served less in glasses than goblets, with colorful swirls and filigree metal stems. Outside, overlooking the marina, there are open red tables under a broad tree hung with many lanterns. The layered menu is an equally weird riot of images and fonts. ‘A dear old friend’: spare ribs. Photo: Francesca Jones/The Observer All this pageantry and merriment would just be annoying if the food served at Gigi Gao’s Favorite Authentic Chinese wasn’t much, but it depends a lot on everything. Apart from two fried seafood dishes right at the start, which had been left in the deep fat fryer for far too long, the heavily Sichuan-focused food here is big old fashioned with flavor and intent and just bloody good stuff. Gigi arrived in Swansea almost 20 years ago to study law at university and was obviously struck by the lack of good Chinese restaurants. So in 2014, she opened this one in a location further into the city, before moving it here in 2019 and letting her idiosyncratic eye for design run rampant. Inevitably, the long menu has some typical Anglo-Chinese crowd pleasers, especially among the appetizers. Yes, you can have crispy duck and spring rolls, shrimp toast and pasta. There is a list of black bean dishes and another of sweet and sour ones. “Fiery Sauce”: lazy bean curd. Photo: Francesca Jones/The Observer Don’t do it. Order a plate of the refreshingly sharp black fungus salad or another of the shredded cucumber with carrot julienne instead. The menu is rich in these non-meat options, the most exciting of which is a baked potato dish. They arrive in a small wok suspended within an ornate brass frame, with a candle flowing underneath. The potato discs manage to be both crispy and soft at the same time, and seem like they’ve been blanched, then fried, then turned into a mess of spices and chili and black beans to create a delightfully huge crusty flavor. They are so good, so exciting, we order a second serving. To be fair there were eight of us at the table. To be even fairer, it only cost £8.98, which I consider an odd, vaguely arbitrary price, the oddity of which is entirely appropriate for the location. I scan the menu. Almost everything ends in 98, probably because it’s 1p less than 99 and 2p less than the fully rounded £1. Oh yeah, I can do all the math. The key of course is the number before 98. Mostly it’s 6, 7 and 8 with a handful of seafood dishes reaching the lofty heights of 12 and 13. Or, to put it another way, we rampaged through the menu like toddlers let loose on an unlimited sweet mix, didn’t skimp on the booze and kept coming in at less than £40 a head. You could eat here for a lot less and have a great time. ‘Thumping flavours’: baked potatoes. Photo: Francesca Jones/The Observer Vegetarian options include a rare chipped potato dish, served with a bite. I’m used to it being cold. It is served warm, although it goes well with the strong flavors of the baked potatoes. We have eggplants cooked in the deepest and darkest sauces, and bright, a green meadow of garlic spinach to freshen everything up. There is a list of “lazy” dishes because customers kept hearing and misunderstanding the Chinese word lazi, which means chili. Lazy bean curd, made with tofu skins of proud, determined meatiness, comes in another fiery sauce with peanuts and dried chilies to slather on the side. There’s something called barrel beef which, as the name suggests, is a barrel-shaped container lined with aluminum foil and filled with the kind of broth you could lose yourself in on a cold night, or even a warm, thick ribbons only – cooked beef and fresh green herbs, fresh and dried chilies. We order the Coke Chicken Wings and infer from the thick, eye-bulging sweetness of the sauce that it was indeed made with a lot of Coke. The spare ribs in the kind of glossy five-spice sauce you could varnish a boat deck with are an old Cantonese throwback to another kind of Anglo-Chinese restaurant, the ones I used to go to as a kid and love. It’s like going to a party full of interesting people you don’t know and running into a dear old friend in the middle. “Powerfully sharp”: black fungus salad. Photo: Francesca Jones/The Observer We had the great Jeremy Pang, panelist on BBC Radio 4’s flagship show The Kitchen Cabinet and host of his own amazing ITV show on Asian cookery. He was able to walk us through the menu, but you really don’t need a Pang by your side. Just order anything that is even slightly unfamiliar. It’s fair to say Gigi took a shine to Jeremy, but really I think we were just one big table of excited eaters ready for all he had to offer. And offered the lot. To embellish the old line for Sinatra, it was Gigi Gao’s world of candy, garlands, ribbons, sequins and tassels. we just lived in it. Is it really authentic? I do not care. What matters is that it’s good.
News Bites
Yorkshire-based Truefoods, which makes restaurant-quality stocks and sauces – I swear by their beef jus and so do many top kitchens – has finally launched an online store. Products include everything from basic stocks to ready-made sauces to Diane steak sauce, kombu dashi and Thai broths. The minimum order is eight cases and must be placed every Monday by midday, for delivery to most of mainland Britain the following Thursday. Order here. Hawksmoor steakhouse group is once again holding its annual charity fundraiser in aid of Action Against Hunger. The dinner takes place at Hawksmoor Guildhall on Saturday 10 September and tickets cost £200 for a multi-course feast cooked by a star-studded ensemble of Brat’s Tomos Parry and Florence Knight of Sessions Art Club, along with Hawksmoor’s Matt Brown. The host of the evening will be the fairy-tale ego. Tickets here. A testament to how hard it is to find restaurant staff these days: both Northcote Manor in Lancashire and JKS, the company behind major London restaurants such as Gymkhana, Sabor, Bao and Lyle’s, have launched paid apprenticeships . The JKS Apprenticeship Academy will offer programs for two sets of 11 candidates in both back and front of house and will last up to 16 months, with successful apprentices offered jobs at the end. The Northcote scheme is looking for five apprentices. Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
