From Ireland, Sally went home to Asheville, and I flew Aer Lingus to my next destination and new travel partner: London, with my chef friend, Ted.
Readers of The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry may recognize the name. “Chef Friend Ted” appears throughout the text, from sharing his deep thoughts on stock making to crating up a three-foot wide paella pan to ship to Anna Maria Island for our rehearsal dinner. We’ve been friends since 1996, when I first moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft and began hosting ridiculously ambitious dinner parties. We’ve been scheming and cooking and eating, thick as thieves, ever since.
Our Airbnb is on Charing Cross Road, just off Cambridge Circus, directly across the street from the Covent Garden flat I lived in for five years. (More on that in another post, it’s related to some upcoming news.)
Fresh from Ireland and its free-flowing Guinness, its butter-drenched comfort dishes and pristine seafood, my body was staging a quiet rebellion. It wanted fire. It wanted the kind of heat that blooms at the back of your throat and makes your eyes water and your heart sing. So the first place we went for dinner?
Chinatown in London.
London’s Chinatown feels ancient, layered, like it has always been there, but it dates only to the 1960s. The original Chinese community had settled in Limehouse, near the dockyards, where immigrant labor found a foothold in an otherwise unwelcoming city. Then the German bombers came. The Blitz devastated the docklands, killing an unknown number of Chinese immigrants and shattering the tight-knit community. In the years that followed, the survivors migrated west to the southern reaches of Soho, then seedy, with cheap rents, and out of sheer will and hard work, built something new. Restaurants, markets, Eastern medicine shops bloomed along Gerrard and Lisle Streets, lantern by lantern, bowl by bowl.
Today, Gerrard Street is the busiest pedestrian street in London. Every doorway frames some kind of Asian eatery. The air smells of roasted duck fat and sesame and frying oil. But Chinatown is also a victim of its own success: foot traffic so relentless, demand so fierce, that storefronts here command four times the rent of nearby Covent Garden. Hence the pitch men and women posted outside every entrance, trying to wave in customers. This also explains the frenetic pace of service, tables turning fast enough to make you dizzy if you look up too long.
After making our obligatory tour of the Asian markets, an absolute requirement for two food professionals just landing in a new city, we made our way to Dumplings Legend on our first night, housed in the storied former home of the famed Lee Ho Fook. We ordered Bang Bang Shrimp and a Sichuan pork belly stir-fry. Our server looked us over carefully.
“You know the shrimp come with the shell on?” she asked.
Yes, we assured her.
“The shrimp, the stir fry, they are both spicy. Very spicy.” Not a question. A warning.
We nodded eagerly, perhaps too eagerly. She studied us the way a doctor studies a patient who insists they don’t need a second opinion.
“You sure?”
Ted answered simply, “We’re both trained chefs.”
Her whole face shifted. “Ah. Oh. OK, then.” She walked away satisfied.
She was right to warn us. The shrimp arrived glowing and red in their shells, lacquered in chili oil and reeking of Sichuan peppercorns, each bite a small, perfect act of controlled destruction, numbing the mouth like a slow tide.
The stir-fry hit differently, spicy, but studded with twice-cooked pork belly cut as thin as crepe paper. Chef Ted studied a piece, trying to work out how it was made. I could see his brain calculating a method to make it himself. (He later explained he’d cook in his ceramic grill over a low fire for about five hours, then slice it thin.)
By the end, the paper tablecloth was slicked with so many streaks of sauce and bits of discarded shrimp shells it looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. We liked it so much, we went back the next night.
“Ah, the chefs! You back for more spicy?” she asked, laughing, pointing at a table like she’d been expecting us.
In between visits, we slipped into another spot in Chinatown in London for crispy duck and dim sum. We held out as long as we could but could but after seeing a great many deep, mahogany shiny ducks hanging in window after window, we finally relented. That’s also where I learned that some London Chinese restaurants call xiao long bao “Bruce Lee dumplings.”
“Because you have to punch the dough many, many times,” explained the pitch man at the entrance of the Feng Shui Inn on Gerrard Street, describing soup dumplings. He even pantomimed punching to make sure we understood. “If the dough is not tender, the hot soup inside, it leaks out.”
I have never been cheered by a name for a food more in my entire life.
This is part of a series of culinary travel pieces from a month in Ireland and London in April 2026. Visit the main page for more adventures in eating and drinking.
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