'A wonderful discovery': Mr Hong's, Chinatown, reviewed

At Mr Hong’s the menu is full of dishes containing words such as bullfrog, aorta, trotter, intestine. But what did ‘braised pork with Sydney (salty)’ comprise? More of that later but I was delighted to find a new favourite restaurant in Manchester’s Chinatown. 

Taken together the dish really was the sum of its parts and a stunning food experience

The entrance to the restaurant is tucked between other venues but is imposing with a grand pediment. The scale of the thing would have been designed to impress customers when the building was a textile warehouse. Inside Mr Hong’s is as plain as plain can be with a simple array of wooden tables and an undistinguished bar.

The Sichuan food is anything but plain. The food is fabulous. It comes in two menus, a red one for your Chinese Western classics and a blue one for authentic exotica. It had to be blue for luck. 

Back to ‘braised pork with Sydney (salty)’.

“What’s salty Sydney, or who?” I asked our charming waitress.

“It’s like a vegetable but not a vegetable, or maybe it is…I don’t know the word in English,” she said.

“We’ll order it then,” I said.

When it arrived, priced £12.80, it was fabulous, the meat was rich and tender with a lovely thick lumps of fat glistening in a fabulously glutinous sauce that was spicy and heavy with soy. Mangetout was present among the many ingredients together with salty Sydney, which we assumed was a typo. Whatever this ‘vegetable not a vegetable’ was it was crunchy with a flavour akin to the sturdier varieties of fungus. All in all the dish was very good and looked very good. 

The best dish was the Chongqing Wanzho (£24.80). I chose this because it made me nostalgic. In 2014 I went on a press trip to Chongqing which is a vast sprawling metropolis at the confluence of the mighty Jailing and Yangtse rivers in south west China. When I say vast I mean it. The municipality is the one of largest city districts by area in the world, about the size of Austria (yep really) although it’s not all built-up. In 2020 it had a population of 32 million, with the main city districts making up 22 million of that figure.

This is the piece I wrote about the visit which was exhilarating, sobering and entertaining. The Chongqing Wanzho roasted fish in its rocket hot spicy broth was exhilarating and entertaining too. The white fish had been salted and then roasted and stewed with the other ingredients in its big sizzling bubbling metal bowl. There was everything chucked in there, potatoes, mushrooms of various descriptions, broad flat noodles, more noodles, herbs, spices, peppers, onions and fabulous lotus root with its satisfying snap. Taken together the dish really was the sum of its parts and a stunning food experience.     

We also had the Yang chow fried rice (£9.80) which came with prawns and ham. This was good but made so much better with that bangingly powerful spicy broth spooned over the rice. To add variety and a bit of green we also had asparagus with mashed garlic (£11.80). This was drab in comparison to the other three dishes and seemed low on the advertised mashed garlic.

There was way too much food for two people to finish but we did our best. I still came away with two decent-sized doggy bags which give the following day a hot Oriental start.

I don’t know why I’ve never been to Mr Hong’s before. Maybe that entrance is too easily walked past. 

It’s curious why my Chinese food afficionado acquaintances have never recommended it to me either. I’ll definitely be back, those bullfrogs won’t wait forever. Certainly, if you want to try something different in Chinatown give Mr Hong’s a go. Salty Sydney agrees.