Chinese buns have become pretty trendy. Squidgy rice-flour baozi – usually filled with pork or veg – have had brilliant modern updates from the likes of Yum Bun, Flesh and Buns and other venues whose names don’t sound like a euphemism for buttocks (Baozi Inn: there’s one).
This, presumably, is what this little takeaway-cum-tiny-sit-in-lunch-spot is aiming for. Buns and dumplings are made by hand in north London, then steamed them onsite. Unfortunately, they aren’t made very well. The pork bao was okay (if a tad low on flavour) and, if they’d doubled the quantity of plum sauce on the duck-filled ‘momo’ (one of the sandwich-style bao), they could have saved it from being a mouthful of dry clagginess. But somehow, the xiao long bao – soup dumplings – contained not a drop of soup. The pastry was so thick that it was like chewing on a swimming cap, and they looked like rubber recreations of a brain that had been left to melt on a radiator (and then sat upon). Pretty dumplings they were not. And that’s saying something, given that even the best-made bun basically looks like a puckered dough bumhole. Does London need another modern baozi joint? Why not? Is this it? Probably not.