EATING oriental once meant going out for a chicken curry
or a plate of sweet and sour pork or a beef chow mein. Then Japanese and Thai restaurants took over and, promoted by their success at selling health-conscious, meat-minimising, de- licately wrought food, the curry house was reborn: stainless steel platters of sauce- swathed, meat-heavy dishes were out; in came the brasseries with their travelogue menus advertising an array of subtly spiced vegetarian concoctions culled from the length and breadth of the subcontinent. The Chinese restaurant has been the last to change. But vegetarianism is no longer the province of the cranky few, we are all vegetarians now.
The Sailing Junk Chinese restaurant in Kensington has responded leguminously to the clarion call of the cardiac system. It has shredded its old menu and six weeks ago re-emerged as 'Sailing Junk: Specialist for Vegetarian Dishes'. God bless her and all who sail in her.
The restaurant is about halfway down Marloes Road, just opposite St Mary Abbot's Hospital. It's a strange area, half dinky mewses, half crumbling Earls Cour- tish boarding houses. The Sailing Junk occupies the basement and ground floors of a once elegant stuccoed house. It came into its original, carnivorous being a couple of years ago, and its vintage shows in the pared-down simplicity of its decor. Walls are a warm parchment and dotted with the odd Chinese print. Linen is pale buttermilk yellow, chairs are a shiny black and the floor, save for an expanse of untreated pine at the front, is the same.
There's not a great deal of choice about what to eat: either you have dinner A (or, as they have it, `dinna' A) or dinner B. And even then it's difficult to tell from the menu what the two dinners comprise. Dinner A, for example, will give you Grand Mixed Vegetarian Hors d'Oeuvres (which turned out to be slices of a curd-like mixture pretending to be meat — some flavoured like char-sui pork, some like chicken and some beguilingly black cubes tasting of liquorice and sprinkled with sesame) and double-boiled winter melon soup, an amber-coloured broth in which float chunks of winter melon (whatever that is: I did try, unsuccessfully, to find out) cut out in shapes of bunny-rabbits and fishes and, I could have sworn, scotties (which is as near as vegetarian Chinese restaurants get to eating dog).
Main courses of dinna A carry on as obliquely: braised Buddhist vegetables Ho Han style; Purple Aura of the Eist; Pineapple Boat; sweet and sour 'Fish' (the inverted commas indicating that it is not in fact real fish, but a substitute made of taro) and rice noodles with vegetables. The vegetables were a marked improvement on the usual oyster-sauced mixture of broccoli stalks and chard-like leaves: ginger and garlic flavoured this dish of mushrooms of various sorts — small shiny buttons, dark fleshy sponges and hot-chocolate pink fans as pleated and silky as a Janet Reger camisole — spiked with crunchy mange- touts. There was some confusion as to what the Purple Aura of the East actually was, but the waiter finally decided that it was the mixed cold noodles (the hot ones were the normal sort — good, but braving no new frontier of taste). These came in two sorts — clear rice noodles, sprinkled with soy and sesame and spiked with some unidentifiable hotness, and darker, chew- ier noodles, swathed in even more hot- ness and even more soy, the whole circled with pickled cucumber and broccoli florets. Best was an unmentioned dish of bean curd (`the best I've ever eaten', said one of my co-researchers) and least convincing the fish-shaped batter parcel filled with a spongy layer of what I imagine was taro and a fine dice of root vegetables. Some- how we missed out on the Pineapple Boat, though you'd think with such an uncompli- cated menu there wouldn't be too many difficulties working out the order. Sweet of the day came in the shape of water- chestnut fritters, the batter rapturously light and flaky, the frittered subject curiously like a faintly fruit-flavoured jelly- fish.
Dinner B is slightly cheaper (£12 a head rather than £15, minimum order for both of them for two peole, which is yet more constraining), but I managed to talk the waiter into letting us try the starters from it, which consisted of a range of diced, shredded and sliced vegetables encased in batter. I don't know how they manage to make deep-fried batter taste like the light- est puff pasty, but they do, and on the strength of these I would advise this menu, provided you put in a plea for the bean- curd.
By the time you've covered beer (although there is a wine list) and service, you'll be spending about £20 a head. £40 for dinner for two can no longer be called expensive. The idea of the set menus is obviously to keep costs down, but if this restaurant is to last it really should intro- duce an a la carte list. A chef as good as the Sailing Junk's obviously is should be en- couraged to break out and play around a little. It would keep the customer happy, too.
Sailing Junk, 59 Marloes Road, London W8. Tel 01-937 2589.
Nigella Lawson
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