An ambitious new Chinese restaurant on Trafalgar Square.
‘What’s important about restaurants in the West End’, my friend proclaimed shortly after we met for lunch in London’s central district, ‘is to realise that there are places that are there to scam you, and many others that aren’t. And you have to avoid the former.’
This comment came the day after my second meal at Gouqi (pronounced goji, like the berry), where dinner for three of us, with one bottle of 2019 Knipser Spätburgunder at £66, came to £292.68. And this was after my solitary dinner with two glasses of wine came to £124.78. On both occasions the service charge was a hefty 15%.
This newly opened restaurant, just south of Trafalgar Square, has been launched by chef Tong Chee Hwee, who was for many years the chef behind the highly successful Hakkasan restaurants where he won several Michelin stars. But going on his own seems only to reveal how much he had come to rely on an organisation that left him to cook while it looked after the many other aspects of running a successful restaurant.
Let me preface my comments by saying how much I enjoy Chinese cooking. To me it is on a par with French, Italian, Japanese, every other mainstream style, and how much I miss our trips to Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Singapore, Hong Kong and even to Melbourne, where the double-boiled milk pudding at the Flower Drum restaurant remains in my mind as the most elegant finale to a Chinese meal.
Back in London, I enjoy the occasional foray into Chinatown, particularly to Dumplings Legend and the Four Seasons restaurant on Gerrard Street where a typical meal would be no more than £25 all-in. And I will happily accept any invitation to eat at Min Jiang in Kensington’s Royal Garden Hotel, an experience which has to come second to Andrew Wong’s fantastic cooking at A Wong in Victoria, where the dinner menu – and only a tasting menu is now available – is £200 per person. On my last visit, in November 2022, it was worth every penny.
Goqui is located on the ground floor of the modern conversion of an old building. Past the reception area, about which more later, there is a bar with counter seating and several raised tables before a row of tables along the front window which offer a very good view of the glassed-in open kitchen opposite. At the far end of the room, up a short step, is an appealing alcove that consists of three extremely snug tables surrounded by red curtains, which are intimate and where the acoustics are excellent.
The problems start with the small cloakroom. On my way out after my first visit, I handed my ticket to the receptionist and watched as she switched on the torch on her iPhone and eventually found it – the cloakroom had no overhead light. This had been installed the next time we were there and eventually we were all reunited with our coats but this was not without my sister-in-law’s necessary intervention behind the curtain.
There seem to be plenty of staff but they are not (yet?) properly marshalled, in my opinion. This was typified by our waitress coming to clean down our table after I had paid and we were all about to leave. All this for £38.18, the 15% service charge on my second bill when the most memorable element was the short-lived appearance of the otherwise unfriendly manager at our table.
Gouqi’s wines have been excellently chosen and are clearly listed in ascending, if ambitious, prices. But they surely make a fundamental error with the menu by making the tactical, psychologically off-putting error of starting every section with the most expensive item.
The hot appetiser that opens the menu is ‘steamed royal dim sum platter’, at £39 almost twice the price of every other dish listed in this section. Soups begin with a cup of superior bird’s nest soup for £95. Then comes the ‘legendary’ Peking duck with Oscietra caviar for £230 (24 hours’ notice required!) at the head of a list of barbecue dishes, followed by 20 heads of whole South African Kippin abalone for £125. The menu continues with variations including Japanese sea cucumbers and South African fish maw before concluding with several equally expensive seafood ingredients.
This seems to me to be the incorrect way of writing the menu whose aim should surely be to entice customers, to lure them in and then persuade them to trade up over time. This is certainly the method that most restaurateurs follow and is of course how Goqui’s wine list is written.
There are plenty of fascinating wines by the glass. I enjoyed two Spanish wines, Las Tinadas old-vine Airén 2019 from Bodegas Verum followed by a glass of mature, elegant 2015 Massard Licis Mencía from Ribeira Sacra during my first visit. And subsequently we all enjoyed the German Spätburgunder chosen by Jancis only a day or two after Stephan Knipser himself had presented his top Pinots in this tasting. Other wines that attracted me were an Assyrtiko 2021 Ktima Kir-Yianni from northern Greece for £45 a bottle; a bottle of 2018 Red Newt Riesling, Finger Lakes, USA for £90 and a bottle of 2017 Ascheri, Barolo, Piedmont, Italy for £110. We had little trouble in passing on a bottle of 2020 Ch d'Esclans, Garrus Provence rosé at £275 from an otherwise intriguing wine list.
There is clearly a moral question as to whether any restaurant opening in 2023 should be offering dishes associated with endangered wildlife, such as birds’ nest soup, Japanese sea cucumbers or abalone. But setting these aside would strip this menu of many of its dishes.
At my first dinner I began with a bowl of hot and sour soup with seafood (£16) and followed this with poached crystal jumbo prawns in an XO sauce with yellow chives (£42 for the two extremely elegantly presented large prawns shown above) plus a serving of 10 spears of bok choy which added a further £23 to my bill. The small bowl of rice in the background was a further £6.
On our return visit we began with the royal dim sum platter for our table of three – which highlighted a further problem as these brightly coloured dim sum were served to us in pairs, which made sharing them difficult. This was more than made up for, however, by a dish of aromatic duck salad which contained plenty of warm meat and crisp slices of taro, shown below with the remains of our dim sum. Of our main courses, a dish of fried scallops with minced prawns (£35) was delicious and intriguing, seafood coated in crisp seafood, as were two predominantly vegetable dishes – mapo tofu with minced beef (£32) and the braised Szechuan aubergine served in a clay pot (£26) shown in our main image above.
It is worth pointing out that this ambitious new restaurant is only a five-minute walk from the bargain restaurants of London’s Chinatown.
I hope Gouqi succeeds but as the first six months in the life of any business are crucial, here is my advice to Hwee and his team.
- Avoid dishes that might be dependent on endangered species, unless their ingredients are sustainably farmed and this is made clear on the menu.
- Enliven your menu and broaden your dessert menu. What were your grandmother’s favourite desserts? Offer more explanation of why you like to cook certain dishes, make them more enticing.
- Lower your service charge from the extortionate 15% to the far more common 12.5%. Nicklas and Chiara may be charming members of your waiting team but this is far too high.
- Sort your cloakroom out!
Gouqi 25–34 Cockspur Street, London SW1Y 5BN; tel: +44 (0)20 3771 8886