Restaurant review: Chop Chop, Commercial Street, Edinburgh

Published on Sunday 27 June 2010 11:29

THIS is just the first step," says Roy King as we sit in Chop Chop on Leith's Commercial Quay. "By the time we open branches in Aberdeen and Glasgow there will be five in Scotland. But that's only the beginning. Why not London or New York or LA? Why not every city in the world? The scope is potentially limitless."

It's launch week for the Leith restaurant, the first addition to the stable since Chop Chop was launched in Morrison Street in January 2006, but King and his wife Jian Wang are clearly in bullish mood. And it's little wonder: the husband-and-wife team have enjoyed a stellar success that King happily admits has taken even them by surprise.

Their story is such an unusual one that it bears repeating. In 1997 Wang, a cook from Changchun in north eastern China, a mountainous region famed for its jiaozi or dumplings, arrived in Edinburgh and set about trying to open a dumpling factory. Although virtually no-one she spoke to believed the little Chinese woman could make it work, one man bought into her vision and that man was her business adviser Roy King.

Marriage, a dumpling factory, numerous awards and contracts to supply P&O and Sainsbury's were followed in 2006 by the opening of the stark, unprepossessing Chop Chop restaurant, two minutes' walk from Haymarket station.

The rest constitutes one of restaurant-land's best-known Cinderella stories. The ugly little restaurant with its strip lights and formica tables doesn't get any better-looking but the sheer quality of the fare on offer brings the world streaming to Wang's table. Fantastically cheap prices and a torrent of favourable reviews lauding Chop Chop as the best Chinese restaurant in Scotland, if not the known world, means the place is stowed out night after night.

Wang's appearance on Gordon Ramsay's F-Word television show last year propelled the cult classic into the mainstream; getting into the restaurant now is like trying to book at table at The Witchery on Valentine's night.

Given Wang's track record of over-arching ambition and her front-of-house husband's background as a plotter of business strategy, it's little surprise that a second restaurant has followed. Nor is it any shock that it's in Leith's bustling little strip, next to established performers Kitchin and Daniel's; and, far more importantly, looking out on the Scottish Executive building that houses 2,000 hungry civil servants. "They can't all want to eat in the canteen every day," reasons King, and he's apparently right – by 1pm on every day of its first week the place is filling up nicely and the trade in the business lunch deal is brisk.

Many of those civil servants will already be familiar with Chop Chop, and King and Wang have been careful not to do anything to confound their expectations. This former site of a Beanscene may have nice wooden floors, views on to a cobbled walkway and pond replete with fountains, not to mention fixtures and fittings that make the mothership in Haymarket look almost third world, but in all other respects, Chop Chop in Leith is as close to a clone of the original as it's possible to get.

The menu is exactly the same, and so is the food. The theory is that this is a little like Chinese tapas so we order not just a range of the boiled and fried dumplings that are Chop Chop's USP, but also some of the other dishes you won't find in many mainstream Chinese restaurants. Fishballs, pork ribs, pork with coriander and ginger, spinach and peanuts, the house speciality of aubergines cooked in an obscene amount of garlic, and a pork chow mein made with noodles manufactured that morning in the company's Edinburgh factory all disappear with indecent haste.

The meal is rounded off with sugar string apple, a glorious traditional but tricky dish that every chef in China needs to be able to cook if they are to pass their formal qualifications. It's basically cooked apple coated in caramelised sugar, which is dipped into ice water, turning the sugar into a brittle shell encasing the piping-hot apple. It is an enormous dish that could feed four people, and it's as good as it is rare in this country.

If the excellent food and encyclopaedic menu are exactly the same as the Haymarket original, you don't get an identical eating experience because there's none of the sense of breaking new ground that you got when eating in Morrison Street. But if there's an unmistakable feeling that the Leith offshoot is more knowingly, nakedly commercial, that's probably because it is.

Yet it still produces fantastic, authentic Chinese food at prices which, while significantly higher than they once were, are still low enough to ensure the place continues to be a runaway success (even if its alcohol license has yet to come through). No wonder King is able to say, with some justification, today Haymarket, tomorrow the world.

Chop Chop

80 Commercial Street,

Edinburgh (0131-221 1155, www.chop-chop.co.uk)

Bill please: Business lunch deal 7.50; Meal for two 36.55; A la carte 4.10-10.35

Rating: ****

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, June 27, 2010