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By the junction of Wardour and Gerrard Street, you’ll find one of London’s most iconic culinary institutions: Wong Kei. It’s the epitome of ‘no frills’ dining, with square mirrors decorating each white wall and red velour seats, legs scraping against grey tiled flooring. Over the last three decades, this restaurant has evolved from its origins as a cramped alleyway shop in the mid-1970s into the five-story establishment it is today – though aesthetically, it has remained largely the same – and its reputation now far exceeds Chinatown.
Wong Kei rapidly gained popularity upon opening for its Cantonese soul food classics served at breakneck speed and cheap-as-chips prices. Yet despite the restaurant’s efforts to remain unchanged – in interiors, in menu – its cult status means that the words ‘Wong Kei’ evoke a multitude of different emotions, depending on who you ask. While ‘Chinatown’ might suggest a monolithic identity, Wong Kei is in its own lane: no other restaurant in the area elicits such strong reactions across as many people, nor has a specific tumblr account dedicated to documenting every dish.
As food writer Jenny Lau from Celestial Peach says: ‘What interests me is the way in which its customers, particularly the non-Chinese ones, talk about the food and restaurant. The anecdotes, projections and expectations that endure around Wong Kei – the discourse, in other words – reveal how the general public consume Chinese people and their culture, through their food.’ Through hyper-efficient service and the sheer volume of customers they’re able to sit (its current capacity being around 500 seats), Wong Kei has fed central London for decades: serving customers from all walks of life looking for a cheap and quick Cantonese immersion.
Time Out caught up with the restaurant’s mega-fans, food writers and London’s Chinese community organisers to tell its story.
First impressions
Wong Kei’s early superstardom was fuelled by an unbeatable offering: delicious food at dirt cheap prices, where in the 1970s, a pork chop rice was about £1.20, thought to be half the price of any other restaurant in Chinatown. However, it seems the only way to make this business model work was to employ optimum efficiency to achieve the level of turnover needed. This often translated into blunt service, which was less unusual in ‘chacaantengs’ (local diners in Hong Kong) but much more so amidst British niceties. Hence Wong Kei gained a playful notoriety, where customers would come for an affordable meal but stay for the people watching, until they were inevitably kicked out for the next diners.
David Tsui (university student living in Chinatown, 1977-1980): I’d walk through the door and before I even opened my mouth to ask for a table, the waiters would scream ‘First floor! First floor!’ in Cantonese, hurrying me upstairs.
Georgie Ma (podcaster, Chinese Chippy Girl): I remember coming as a kid in the ’80s. The chefs would always come out and give their staff and customers a mouthful of the most colourful Cantonese curse words.
Jabez Lam (Chinatown community organiser in the 1970-80s, currently manager of Hackney Chinese Community Centre): One time, a customer was reading a newspaper and didn’t hear the waiter deliver his plate of beef brisket with rice. When no one took the dish, the waiter yelled at their colleague who originally took the order: ‘who the f*** is this ao lam fan for!’. The other waiter explodes back in Cantonese, pointing at the customer: ‘that f***er wearing glasses, with the crooked teeth!’
David Tsui: Everyone called the owner ‘校長’, which means ‘principal’, or more colloquially in Cantonese, ‘the boss’. He would usually be making wonton noodles by the cooked food counter at the front, wearing the same outfit everyday: a plain white shirt, grey gilet and creased black trousers.
At this point, it’s as London as a place like Pellicci’s
Lawrence Lee (spokesman for London Chinatown Chinese Association): I remember seeing a customer complain that a waiter’s thumb was in her wonton noodle soup when he was serving her the bowl. He instantly replied that he had just been testing the temperature to make sure it was right for her. The waiters were comedians!
MiMi Aye (food writer and chef): One time I was having some beef noodle soup, but I developed a headache and wanted to take paracetamol, so I asked for some tap water – the waiter refused and actually scolded me. I ended up just slurping the paracetamol down with the soup and it put me off going back for quite a while!
A portal into Chinese culture
Especially before the 2000s, Wong Kei represented one of the rarer opportunities for British diners to experience Chinese culture in a way that felt stripped back and unfiltered, and was particularly accessible given its low price point. Yet for the British-Chinese, or the Chinese living in London from abroad, it represented soul food; a reliable taste of home.
David Paw (food writer and editor): It’s this dual role that Wong Kei plays that allows it to transcend the Chinatown narrative. At this point, it’s as British or as London as a restaurant like Pellicci’s or Rules… essentially third culture in identity.
Janae Mikabe (Wong Kei superfan for ten years, Caribbean heritage): For someone who isn’t very experienced in Asian culture, I learnt how to use chopsticks by going to Wong Kei. I learnt that you have Chinese tea with your food. It felt like my closest way of experiencing Chinese culture in a raw and authentic way, so I’ve really appreciated that.
Dan Tsu (superfan, community organiser and cultural events programmer): I’ve been going for 30 years and it holds a very special place for me, being one of the few deep rooted connections I have with my British-Chinese heritage. I even recently wrote a poem about racism that references Wong Kei. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I would go two to three times a week. I’d take my best friends, adventurous or cheap dates, my colleagues… if you knew me well enough, we would go to Wong Kei. It was a rite of passage of being my mate.
David Paw: My favourite personal experiences at Wong Kei are existing, alone, in peace with some tea and a book in the communal canteen at the front… or escaping some dreary party or fancy restaurant to order a plate of steaming hot scrambled eggs and pork on rice.
There aren’t many other places you can eat solo for cheap and not have to speak to anyone
Dan Tsu: I also normally take a seat in the forlorn welcome area. It’s unusual because all the miserable, solo people are at the front, just chowing down food on their own, not speaking to each other – but also comforting, because there aren’t many other places where you can eat solo for cheap and not have to speak to anyone.
Five-star service
While Wong Kei’s unique dining experience helped buoy its popularity, the ignorant interpretation that all Chinese food culture was therefore ‘cheap and rude’ helped to feed damaging racial stereotypes. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Chinese takeaways and restaurants across the country often dealt with harassment and theft, ranging from youths prank-calling orders to physically throwing bottles, or customers ordering food and then refusing to pay, only for the police to dismiss the crime as ‘not serious enough’.
Jabez Lam: There was one case in 1988 where three men tried to leave Wong Kei after their meal without paying. Once the police arrived after being called by staff, the police told them that ‘there was nothing further they could do’ and let the men go. It was clear they didn’t view stealing from the Chinese community as something serious. There were other cases in Chinatown where customers would start a fight and the staff would call the police, only to have the police arrest the staff because they assumed ‘Chinese people are good at kung fu – they must have started the fight’!
David Paw: There’s a famous essay in an old issue of [food journal] Lucky Peach that questions this idea of ‘service’ – that, in Asia, the entire concept of ‘ideal’ service is to bring your food to you in the quickest and most efficient manner possible – which runs counter to Western notions of service as this coddling embrace. Both are valid, but that Wong Kei embodied the Asian ideal and hasn’t been recognised for just how competent it is represents, to me, a wholly racist attitude to non-European cultures.
Dan Tsu: I mean I could order a meal and get my food in two minutes. I’ve timed it. I can guarantee I would get my meal quicker than at the old McDonald’s, before they had all the screens. As someone who was a culture fiend, always going to shows in and around Central London, I knew I could be in and out of that place, having fed myself, within ten minutes.
London’s ‘rudest’ restaurant?
In 2004, Wong Kei became the subject of a slanderous article published in The Evening Standard. The writer claimed that the restaurant had hired him without a work permit, and witnessed ‘illegal immigrants working 12 hours a day… pay packets substantially below the minimum wage… [and] a total disregard for food hygiene standards’. The article construed harmful assumptions around cheap food and culturally direct service somehow equating to dire working conditions and low food standards. The three owners at the time had recently taken over from the original founder and enlisted Jabez Lam for help, as someone who had successfully campaigned for other community causes in Chinatown.
Jabez Lam: I advised them that the best way forward was to highlight the inaccuracies, as the article provided a lot of false details that the owners could disprove. We got a law firm involved and The Evening Standard finally retracted their article in December that year, after admitting they’d lost touch with the journalist.
Wong Kei now has an outsized importance as a living historical artefact
David Paw: If you Google ‘Wong Kei’, the first few pages are old stories from across the UK about it being London’s ‘rudest’ restaurant, feeding into lazy tropes of East and Southeast Asian people and certain cultural traits being played for cheap laughs.
Lawrence Lee: Wong Kei famously had long running staff – these people wouldn’t stay if they were being treated the way the article said, because there were lots of work opportunities in Chinatown at the time. There was visible camaraderie among the staff to one another – they were funny and hard working people, very much bonded by the stressful environment.
Jabez Lam: It was definitely high pressure, though, with that level of customer turnover. I used to know the manager back in the ’80s, who said when he hired a new door person to tell customers which table to go to, the man’s wife said that in his sleep, he would still be muttering: ‘That table! Over there!’
A new Chinatown
Following a brief period of closure in the 2000s, the restaurant reopened in 2014 after a renovation effort, although the decor remained largely the same. The current manager, Daniel Luc, famously said after the reopening: ‘Maybe there was an issue with rude staff 20 to 30 years ago, but I don’t think so any more. I don’t know whether that's a good thing or not!’
Dan Tsu: In the last two to three years, I’ve started to lose the love of Wong Kei and Chinatown, partially because there’s potentially better or more diverse foods to get closer to my area. It’s now much easier to find other cheap eats in central London that contain the more authentic qualities I now find missing from Chinatown. It used to feel like a niche place for the community, now it feels much more like a place for tourism – and this reflects the evolution of London in many ways. Less soul, more shininess. The rent increases have had a huge impact on the ownership of spaces.
David Paw: As landlords convert Chinatown – formerly a bastion of London’s Cantonese community – into a broader ‘Asiatown’, something that’s far from unique to London, this gives Wong Kei an outsized importance as a living historical artefact in the heart of the capital. It’s a reminder of the communities that came to a previously undesirable part of London after WWII and built the city up again into a neighbourhood that attracted some of the first Asians to build a life here, and paved the way for successive communities from across Asia. For that reason, there’s an argument to be made that places like Wong Kei deserve to be protected as places of intangible cultural heritage and not just businesses that a landlord can cycle through at will.
Georgie Ma: So many restaurants have come and gone. These days, there are more East and South East Asian ones [in Chinatown], not just Cantonese, but Wong Kei is definitely one of the originals.
Just the usual
Although Chinatown looks different today to how it did when the restaurant first opened, Wong Kei’s menu is longstanding, unchanged – and just as mouth-watering as ever.
David Paw: For years my go-to was beef brisket noodle soup; lately it’s been the eggs and pork over rice. If you’re ever in doubt on what to order, the Wong Kei Tumblr is a compendium of [almost] every single one-plate item that’s offered on the menu and makes for essential reading.
Dan Tsu: [I go for] Chasiu pork or pork belly with rice and lots of chilli oil from those pots that would sit out for days and surely can’t be hygienic, but tasted so damn good.
Alex Gradwell-Spencer (superfan from Manchester, visiting Wong Kei for 30 years):
I always have the satay beef and an enormous bowl of wonton soup. They also do the best beef fried rice that I’ve had anywhere… my dad always used to order it, and now when I take my kids, they order the same!
Mimi Aye: Wong Kei is considered somewhere that has existed since the beginning of time and maybe people don’t go to it as much as they used to, but they’d still be heartbroken and shocked if it ever went away. It’s like an old Auntie that we should probably visit more often. I also respect that it’s still cash-only, which only enhances the Auntie vibes.
Time Out repeatedly reached out to current Wong Kei owners for a statement but received no response.
Recommended: The best restaurants in London’s Chinatown