Yauatcha

krikke

Cool place with a lot of junk food 1st September 2009

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What a great place. You can come here almost every day and enjoy your lunch...

brenna

Top notch 12th February 2009

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Top notch food at reasonable price for a restaurant in Soho. Well worth a trip - make sure you get the crispy duck!

barbd

Yum yum dim sum 10th December 2008

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This is a special place - for those dreary London winter afternoons. Quite pricey but as always, you get what you pay for.

Simply delicious dim sum, and many other tasty treats too, washed down with a cold fresh white wine. Can't think of anything else that I'd rather be doing (well one or two things ;)

Happy staff too - and a dark funky ambiance - make this an occasional (depending on your wallet) bolthole...

mandylayton

Mixed reports 30th November 2008

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Went for afternoon tea with the family. The food is excellent and the quality and range of green tea's are superb. The service is not very good though. I kept asking for water and after asking for the forth time I went and got it myself from the bar. It is a mystery to me how varied the service can be when the food is so great and actually pretty reasonable priced.

oledoe

...and cakes 26th November 2008

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Hey, not just the dim sum, also the wee cakes and pastries are delightful.

(their web site is at www.yauatcha.com)

sue

It's true what they say about the Venison Puffs 23rd August 2008

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Why did it take me so long to visit Yauatcha? I think because I thought it was some sort of pretentious, expensive place where only the 'beautiful' people could get a table. I was so wrong, well they let us in didn't they!

Booking in advance, we got a table at Yauatcha for a Sunday lunch. After some serious browsing in Carnaby Street before hand we were ready to sample what we hoped would be some pretty special dim sum, and happily our experience lived up to expectation.

We had booked a table on the ground floor, and I'm glad we did. The downstairs, whilst interestingly decorated, looked a bit cramped and dark, especially on a sunny day. The service was friendlier than I was expecting and I was impressed with their efficiency considering how busy the restaurant was.

Knowing the menu was going to be large, and not being dim sum experts, I did some research in advance to see what dishes others recommended. This did indeed make the ordering process easier, though we still took our time, starting with a couple of interesting sounding cocktails - the Kumquatcha and the Lalu (or something like that), neither of which I was too keen on.

The food we ordered was:
Har Gau
Scallop and Kumquat Dumplings
Baked Venison Puffs
Prawn Cheung Fun
Pork, Prawn and Tofu balls
Pork and Century Egg Congee

My favourites were the Prawn Cheung Fun and the Venison Puffs - those tasty little venison parcels were as good as everyone says. The congee wasn't something I had had before - a type of creamy, rice soup with pork and preserved egg, the latter tasting better than it looked!

Can't believe we didn't have room for dessert, as they have amazing looking cakes on display which you can buy to take away too. My next visit may well just be for tea and cake sampling. And perhaps a cheeky serve of Venison Puffs too...

chrisp

Exciting and unique 12th August 2008

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It's certainly been a month or two of ups and downs around these here parts. I had barely got over the shock that the once-great Fox and Hounds gastropub on Latchmere Road seemed to be no long able to cook duck properly when my other favourite restaurant the Food Room was taken over by a semi-celebrity chef who constructs dishes out of a revolutionary new ingredient called "bland". It was all very upsetting, and coupled with my new self-imposed budget I could see no easy way of the restaurants of London redeeming themselves any time soon. And then, out of nowhere, a delightful meal at an unpromising location in Parson's Green got the whole thing back on track, and this weekend the successful streak continued with a pleasing and pleasingly inexpensive meal at Yauatcha, Soho.

The word for the interior is "glamorous" - Yauatcha is a stunning room, all blue glass and tasteful lighting with a huge aquarium along one wall. And, hilariously, glamorous is the word they used themselves when we called to make the booking and enquired about a dress code. "Casual glamorous" they specifically replied - presumably this doesn't apply in quite the same way to the male diners, although this is Soho after all so who knows. Perhaps they just felt they couldn't get away with saying "no riff raff". I managed to sneak in under the radar anyway.

The menu was huge and baffling, but fortunately we had with us someone of Chinese heritage (who had also scoured the internet for tips beforehand) to guide us through and I was happy to leave most of the ordering up to them. I won't describe every dish in detail as there were about 100 of them, but highlights included crispy venison pastry puffs which I think had chocolate in there somewhere, impossibly light and silky prawn dumplings, astonishing scallops topped with bitter kumquat and some superb Cheung Fun (sort of a long floppy ravioli - that's them at the back of this shot):

Once the dim sum were over with we were presented with a rather more prosaic Chinese dish of beef noodles, although even this had its merits. Also I should say that the jasmin tea-smoked spare ribs were a bit tough although the flavour was good. But the best surprise of all was that the whole kit and caboodle (including a cocktail and a few beers) came to little over £25 each including tip. Considering the effort that must have gone into each individual dish, this is very reasonable - and particularly in comparison to Hakkasan where I spent twice that on food which wasn't any better.

Desserts - and apologies for the lack of photos but I was probably too busy eating - were very pretty and the best by common consensus was one involving passion fruit. Another tasted like Southport public baths and was somewhat less successful but at least they looked the part. All the desserts, along with a mouthwatering selection of macaroons, are displayed in the front window and the takeaway service appeared to be doing a roaring trade throughout the evening.

So add in smiley and attentive service (itself somewhat of a minor miracle in a Chinese restaurant in the UK) and you have yourself a great evening out. Yauatcha, along with Barrafina and Busaba Eatthai, has just been added to my list of places to eat in Soho, and is probably the best Chinese restaurant in London at the moment so you can do at lot worse than mosey on along and check it out for yourself.

gogmagog

Dim sum fans will love it 14th July 2008

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We went for lunch and were seated downstairs in the sumptuous basement. Sleek and stylish but without being stuffy. The bar with in-built fishtank is great. Possibly not the best place for a lunch on a sunny day - it is one of those rooms that you could happily emerge from hours later, half-cut and wondering what happened to the day.

Other reviews below have mentioned bad experiences with waiting staff? There was no sign of this when we went. None of us at lunch were experts on dim sum so we asked the waiters to suggest dishes for us. They were helpful and polite, even though, out of a table of four, there was one vegetarian who did eat fish and one meat-eater with a serious allergy to seafood. A tricky situation when eating dim sum. Not only did they advise us well, they also remembered to point out exactly what was in each dish as it came to the table.

So, is it expensive? Yup. It is. But it's supposed to be a step or several up from your standard Soho dim sum house and that's what you're paying for. Was it value for money, though? Well, I guess my view is coloured slightly. I'm not a huge fan of dim sum, as a rule. It's easy for it to end up greasy and stodgy and although Yauatcha's food was never either of these things, I can't say that it was a Damascene revelation for me. It was beautifully cooked and very tasty, but ultimately rather unmemorable.

The venison puffs (as mentioned by other reviewers) were fine, but not to die for. Various prawn and chicken dishes went past, although it's now 2 weeks later and I'll be damned if I can remember anything about any of them. There was nothing wrong with them; in fact I remember them as being nice, but nothing stood out for me. An ostrich chow mein was interesting, but mainly because it was a first try of ostrich, rather than because it was an incredible dish. There was also crispy duck, but it was no better or worse than one you could get on your local high street, unfortunately.

Take a fan of dim sum and I'm sure they'll love you for it. It's a beautiful restaurant, with friendly and attentive staff. And the food is, well... fine.

MartyDiBergi

Excellent Dim Sum 11th January 2008

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It's crazy to say Yauatcha is expensive - what do people expect to pay for some of the best cooking in London, certainly of its kind?

When put into the context of other similarly feted places - River Cafe, Nobu etc - it really is not expensive at all. Ok so it's more expensive than Busaba but the quality and obvious care and attention is much higher too.

I've eaten there on many occasions and the best advice i would give is to just try various things off the menu that you like the sound of, you will rarely be disappointed.
Having said that, the Venison Puffs are a must.

Other Prawn (and indeed all the other) Cheung Fun, prawn and date dumpling, salt and pepper squid, jasmine smoked ribs, mango spring roll, Shumai, duck and shitake dumpling, prawn toast - are all excellent and i would go on if i could remember them!

Just try it - it's great.

When busy service can sometime be variable but on the whole they are very prompt and the little desserts in the tea parlour are great too. In spite of the much famed 90 minute table time, i've never yet been asked to move on and i must have been 10 times now.

Also best to go in a number divisible by three as almost evry dish comes in 3's.

And anotehr tip - a lot of the wine list can be pricey but there is a very reasonable fizzy pink whose name escapes me for about £26 a bottle i think? Good value for London and brightens up the meal without costing the earth.

Enjoy

russ9595

Delicious and filling 26th December 2007

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Excellent service, delicious food, and reasonably priced given the quality.

After some last-minute Christmas shopping on a late Sunday afternoon, I popped in here because I felt like indulging myself. It was relatively quiet here at this time day and time, and was seated immediately on the ground floor.

I ordered the pork and Century egg congee, kumquat scallop dumplings, pan-fried turnip cake, mango spring roll, and Dragon Well green tea, which came to £30 including service.

I have a large appetite, and I had been shopping on an empty stomach, so you can imagine how hungry I was. Regardless, I have to say that my appetite was definitely satiated by the end of my meal.

The portions here were welcomingly larger than expected. The congee is deliciously flavoured and appropriately garnished. The turnip cake was definitely a dish to share for two and was just like the ones I had in Singapore. The scallops were okay, a little tough for my liking, and I felt the mango spring rolls could have done with 30 seconds more in the oil.

The atmosphere on the ground floor is calm, and perfect for people watching. The chairs are nicely designed, with an arm rest on one side, which I thought was a nice touch. When you sit back, the angle of the back of the chair is just right so that it supports you without falling into a slouch.

I've read a lot of negative reviews about the service here ever since it opened in 2004. In almost all of the reviews, these people came on a Saturday evening. My advice: come here on an early Sunday evening, order the congee, turnip cake, and tea, and you will have a enjoyable experience. I know I did.