Mama Wang's

Roujiamo: £4 (small), £5 (large)

Mama Wang's Kitchen stall,
Opposite the Archway Budgens on Holloway Rd.

My friend Z reminded me that I hadn't written anything since October. Truth be told, it's because I've been on poverty rations while trying to find paying work. No luck yet, but hopefully I'll be able to wangle my budget so I can make the occasional foray into street food.

Today's visit was to Archway market. Jammed between high-class Highgate and hard-to-like Holloway, Archway is little more than a comfortably middle class junction.  Raising it from its torpor is the Saturday market (opposite Budgens....such a middle-class direction).  Here you can get hand-milled Irish breads, free-range duck eggs, salted caramels and roujiamo.

Hold up...I know you were following me until that last one, so let me explain.

Roujiamo are Chinese sandwiches.  Specifically, northern Chinese sandwiches of long-braised pork or lamb, some lightly pickled vegetables, a slathering of piquant tomato chutney and a few crispy bits. An English muffin struggles valiantly to contain the ingredients, but fails: porky sauce covered my hands for the rest of the day while chunks of meat and veg slipped from my grasp and onto the pavement. I'd recommend a two-hand grab, plenty of napkins and a firm bite.

Enough on the logistics.  The flavours are all there: well-spiced pork lost something in having little texture, but otherwise was a pleasure to eat; the vinegar from the vegetables lends a clean undertone to what would otherwise feel like a fatty meal; the tomato sauce needs more punch, but that's probably a subjective statement; and the English muffin holds up well in the face of so much sauce and stuffing.

Archway may not be the most thrilling of suburbs, but it is developing a top-notch market.  Go there to buy the ingredients for the Guardian's latest Ottolenghi recipe, sure, but make sure you grab a cheeky roujiamo, too. It'll make even the Northern Line worth it.

London - Yum Cha

As a student, it doesn't get better than the promise of half-price dim sum.  Yum Cha in Camden offers just that until 7pm, meaning that semi-adventurous lunches and early dinners can be had for little money.  Their dim sum menu is fairly extensive, covering the usual dumpling fare to more intriguing cold dishes such as Jellyfish and Sliced Smoked Pig's Knuckle.  They have a few nods to other parts of East and South East Asia, but the main focus is on mainland China and Hongkong.

When I went with my friend Sarah, we were both hankering after as many dumplings as we could fit in our hungry mouths (and neither of us like jellyfish).  The dim sum dinner menu is packed with different types of dumplings, and we tasted almost all of them, from the gelatinous Crystal Scallop and Prawn Dumpling to the hot and soupy Minced Pork Shanghai Siew Long Bao (normally known as xiao long bao or "xlb") to the steamed and meaty Pork and Prawn Shumai, as well as a good number of others.  With four dumplings per serving with each dish priced around the £3.80 mark, the 50% discount really makes a difference, giving penniless students the ability to eat their way around China's favourite snack foods.

Properly meaty, full of ginger and garlic flavours, their skins just the right thickness and texture to firmly hold their ingredients, the dumplings were a joy to keep popping into my mouth.  My favourite were the Siew Long Bao as there's something deliciously raffish about sucking the hot and juicy soup out of the skins.  The Panfried Shanghai Pork Dumpling were also excellent, the bottoms slightly thicker and a little charred from being fried, giving them a sticky texture that contrasted nicely with the filling.

There were two let-downs. The Honey Roast Pork Buns could have been so much better had their fillings not been so cloyingly sweet and if the puffy white shells had been freshly prepared - biting into these buns should be akin to biting into a pillow made of savoury marshmallow not like fluffy sawdust. Similarly, the ingredients of the Chinese Prawn and Chive Dumpling tasted stale.

For cheap Chinese that tastes like Chinese food in an area trying so hard to be pretentious that having a sleeve tattoo is mandatory, Yum Cha is the place to visit.  To maximise your potential for eating your way around China, it is best to go when their very generous deal is on.

London - Silk Road

49 Camberwell Church St
Camberwell
London SE5 8TR

Big plate chicken: £15
Dumplings: £2.50 for ten
Skewers: £5 for four
Tsingtao beer: £2
Only takes cash.

Ask most people what a Uighur is, and they will look at you funny.  Ask most people what Chinese food is, and they'll mention General Tso's chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, or another dish in a gloopy orange sauce.  Luckily, a trip to Silk Road will improve your cultural and culinary knowledge.  A restaurant run by people from China's Xinjiang region, the people of which are known as Uighurs, serves to emphasise the diversity within Chinese food.  You will not find any of the standard dishes available at your local Chinese takeaway.  Instead, meat is flavoured with spices that echo the Uighurs' Central Asian roots - the skewers are not dissimilar to Middle Eastern kebabs.

Meat is Silk Road's forte.  You can get it on skewers, in dumplings, with noodles, or in stews.  It can be chicken, beef or lamb, and it can be spicy or mild, but it's best to become a carnivore for a couple of hours (especially since a friend said that the vegetarian TEP Noodles dish was one of the more disgusting foods she had ever experienced).

The real star is the big or medium plate chicken.  A stew of chicken and potatoes cooked to tenderness in a sweetly fiery soup, the waiter comes and dumps a couple of handfuls of peppery belt-like noodles into the remaining sauce.  The big plate chicken is a feast for four, but is incredibly reasonably priced at £15.  Although none of Silk Road's dishes are expensive, the big plate chicken is an especially good bargain.

The skewers of hot and spicy cubes of lamb and fat, which are brought sizzling to the table, are another stand-out dish.  The lamb and onion dumplings, eaten with vinegary soy sauce and chillies, are solid and hearty, providing a substantial starter for £2.50.  We wanted to try more dishes, but after these three we were too full and satisfied, a testament to both the quality and quantity of Silk Road's cooking.

London - Noodle Bar

33 Cranbourn St
Westminster, London WC2H 7AD

Sliced Beef La-Mian: £6

Having one of those pre-interview "assessment days" meant that I got to spend some time in London this week.  I bombed out of any possibility of getting an actual interview when I failed to read some key instructions, and so to cheer myself up I went to Noodle Bar, an unprepossessing (so unprepossessing that I walked up and down that section of the street to see if there was another better-looking place), fast-food, Chinese place on the fringes of London's Chinatown.

Now, I am not, generally, a fan of eating sit-down food in Chinatowns (snacks are a different kettle of fish, however).  I think that in large cities, better Chinese food can be found on streets without elaborate arches and too many tourists.  Noodle Bar, however, came recommended from the Chowhound discussion site, and I couldn't risk being in a city with lanzhou noodles and not filling myself up on them.  So off to Noodle Bar I went, hopes high and spirits low.

The first hurdle was explaining what I wanted, and that I definitely didn't want any of the over-fried, greasy stuff in the metal container in the window.  I tried, "Hi, do you have lanzhou noodles?"  This was met with a blank stare and, "Noodles, yes, we have noodles" as the waitress gestured to the metal container.  "No, lanzhou noodles, where you make them" was my really helpful reply.  I realised I had no idea how to communicate what I wanted.  "They're in soup...with meat?" was my final burst of articulateness.  The waitress nodded, "Yes, soup noodles, la-mian noodles."  I had no idea what la-mian was, but I couldn't get any further in trying to explain lanzhou noodles without any Chinese language skills.

What the waitress brought was exactly what I wanted.  A fragrant broth of beef stock, coriander and some other spices, chewy noodles in a small mountain soaking up the broth, with slices of beef and green veg scattered across the top.  The usual soy-and-vinegar combo and chillies in oil were in plentiful supply, and the restaurant itself was cheerful and busy, split evenly between white people eating the greasy window stuff and Chinese people eating steaming piles of noodles.  The man sitting next to me was digging into about three different bowls, and looked really happy to be doing so.  I did the same.  I finished the bowl in about eight minutes, slurping away at the last drops of broth that I could force onto my spoon.

My only other experience of lanzhou noodles has been at the Nan Zhou Hand-Drawn Noodle House  where I ate at least six times this summer.  London's Noodle Bar can't beat it on price (Nan Zhou does a huge bowl for under $5 whereas Noodle Bar's is £6), but I think it has a slight edge in the broth stakes.  At Nan Zhou, you can order your noodles "shaved" (thick and flat) or "pulled" (thin like spaghetti), and due to my poor attempts at communication I don't know whether this is possible at Noodle Bar.  Certainly in terms of originality and price for central London, Noodle Bar cannot be beaten.

I want...

Lanzhou-style noodles. These are rice noodles that are hand-shaved (for the thick ones) or hand-pulled (for the thin ones). Typically they come in a beef broth with lots of vegetables and slices of beef or meatballs. Yum.

Wong Wong

Address: 28 Princess St, Manchester M1 4LB
Tel.: 0161 228 1717
Honey Roast Pork Bun: £1.10
Sweet and savoury buns/pastries: 50p - £1.50.

The other Chinese bakery in central Manchester.  Like Ho's, it's up a short flight of stairs.  Unlike Ho's, it's realised that people might want to hang out in a well-lit and trendy interior rather than a dingy linoleum cavern.

As you walk in, on your right there's a cabinet filled with different types of buns.  About half of these fillings are something-and-pineapple.  Including pork, hot dog, chicken, and some other bizarre combinations.  The roast pork and honey bun is a burning-hot mess of liquid yellow sugar and chunks of chewy pork and fat encased in a chewy bun.  It hits the spot for a quasi-savoury sugar rush, but little else.  The bubble teas taste like the chocolate and strawberry milkshakes you had as a kid.  The Frijj ones with the list of unpronounceable ingredients as long as your arm.  The pastry cabinet holds red bean cakes, green bean cakes, a variety of flaky pastries, and some sad looking pancakes.  There is no time to peruse, instead you are hurried by the women behind the counter as you make snap decisions.

Although Wong Wong has a better environment than Ho's (cheery yellow walls, windows that overlook Princess St) and a larger selection of sweet and savoury snacks, its rushed feel and strange ingredient choices can be off-putting.

I Want To Go There

In no particular order (and some will no doubt have to wait until the job situation improves):

1) Red Chilli (Chinatown, Chinese)
2) Lily's Indian Vegetarian (Ashton-Under-Lyne, Indian)
3) Kabana (Northern Quarter, Indian)
4) Red and Hot (Chinatown, Chinese)
5) Cebu Cafe (Northern Quarter, Filipino) - it's closed down, apparently.
6) Habesha (Gay Village, Ethiopian)
7) Seoul Kimchi (Upper Brook St, Korean)
8) Baekdu (Northern Quarter, Korean)
9) Hunters BBQ (Northern Quarter, Indian)
10) Koffee Pot (Northern Quarter, British)
11) Sindhoor (Burnage, South Indian)
12) Choupan (Cheetham Hill, Iranian)
13) EatGoody (Universities area, Korean)
14) Helen Bakery (Levenshulme, Pakistani)
15) Lahori Dera (Longsight, Pakistani)
16) Afghan Cuisine (Rushholme, Afghani)

Ho's Bakery

Address:  44-46 Faulkner St, Manchester, M1 4FH

Tel.:  0161 236 8335

Roast Pork Bun:  £1.20

Char Siu King Bun:  £1.30

Three mini buns for £1.20

Ho's is a Chinatown institution.  Up a short and grubby flight of stairs, the roomy bakery serves a variety of sweet and savoury, Chinese and Western cakes, buns, dumplings and pastries, with soups and soft drinks also available.

A helpful sign taped to one of the pillars explains why their prices have risen fairly dramatically (although they remain on a par with Wong Wong, Manchester's other Chinese bakery) in recent times - a combination of worldwide food shortages and increasing millers' costs has resulted in more expensive ingredients with the cost being passed onto the customer. 

I, for one, am still willing to pay £1.20 for a roast pork bun, or between 50-80p for a sweet pastry or dumpling.  The pork buns and redbean dumplings, especially, are worth the cost.  Roast pork and onions in a thick, but not cloying, red sauce enveloped by a densely fluffy white bun makes a tasty lunch for those who venture up the steps.  Similarly, the glutinous bite of the sesame-encrusted dumplings filled with a creamy red bean are always top of my list when I visit.  Other favourites are the custard tarts, honey buns, curry buns, and melon pastries, all of which are handed over by the cheerful staff.  The soups, while hot and satisfying, are often overstuffed with peas and contain enough MSG to make you guzzle water until bedtime.  But as every Chinese cafe and restaurant heaps on the MSG like it's going out of fashion, it's hard to hold this against Ho's.