Yauatcha review

Yauatcha is quite an impressive looking place in the middle of Soho. Upstairs there is a tea room with little cakes on offer, downstairs is the main restaurant which is the site of the best dim sum meal I have ever eaten.

The restaurant itself it quite stylish, with plenty of room between tables and a reasonable number of helpful staff milling around. It suggests you are going to have quite an expensive meal. Looking at the comprehensive dim sum menu the price for most of the dishes seemed very low. This led us to order multiple plates of the same dish. A bit of a mistake.

When your food arrives, and it does so promptly, the mistake was plain to see; portions are quite large with multiple pieces of dim sum per plate. I would recommend than even if you are very hungry four plates each would be plenty.

The dim sum was excellent. Char sui buns were as light as clouds and filled with tasty, rich pork. Sesame prawns on toast were delicious, made with a whole large prawn. The duck spring rolls were a delight, stuffed with flavoursome duck meat. All of the little dumplings we ordered were lovely, perfectly cooked and filled with flavour. There was not a single disappointing dish.

For a change, we didn't bother with wine; the Chinese beer was perfectly acceptable to eat with a large meal. Thanks to our ordering it was a very large meal and I ended up happily stuffed.

Due to our heroic ordering the price was a bit high, but if you order less enthusiastically a meal should set you back at around £30 a head.

I cannot recommend Yauatcha highly enough; if you like dim sum this is the place to go in London.

Contact: Yauatcha, 15 Broadwick Street, W1F 0DL. Telephone 0870 780 8265.

David