Taste of Hakkasan menu at Hakkasan, Hanway Place

In a city littered with Chinese restaurants, there is one name which still sets the the benchmark – Hakkasan. The Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant has been a staple on London’s fine dining roster for more than a decade, a tough feat for a city which has a raft of new restaurant openings each week. Dominating the high end, Asian restaurant scene in London along with the likes of Nobu and Zuma, the Hakkasan Group have steadily expanded from the original restaurant in Hanway Place (a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Road) to a second location on Bruton Street in Mayfair as well as Yauatcha, HKK and Sake No Hana. 

I’m yet to try HKK and Sake No Hana but I’m a big fan of Hakkasan and Yauatcha if I want really good dim sum. I tend to head to Hakkasan Mayfair but recently, I had lunch at the Hanway Place restaurant. Both restaurants are incredibly dark, sleek and stylish; heading down some very dark stairs in the bright daylight was a bit disconcerting but being met with the familiar dark wood lattice screens and moody lighting, 

Foodwise, I opted for the Taste of Hakkasan menu which consists of a taster of the best dishes from the menu. I started with a dimsum platter – Scallop, crab, duck and chicken dumplings. As a former dimsum addict, I’m quite fussy but the dumplings at Hakkasan are absolutely delicious – even the scallop shumai which I’m not normally a fan of. Each piece of dimsum was packed with flavour-full meat or seafood and the pastry was the perfect elasticity and texture. 

For mains, I had a selection of small dishes – beef, sea bass, prawns and duck. The beef was absolutely divine, cooked to perfection with a delicious black pepper sauce. The pipa duck was my second favourite followed closely with the Chilean seabass. I didn’t eat the prawns (ex seafood hater) but they looked 

At £35 a head, the Taste of Hakkasan menu is a great introduction to one of the best Chinese restaurants in London. The portions are very generous, so much so that I couldn’t possibly finish my meal off with a dessert – a very rare occurrence. If you’re going for the a la carte menu, I recommend the duck salad, dimsum platter and wagyu beef.