(gentle music) - [Danielle] Amid the pubs and theaters where Piccadilly Circus meets Soho, a cordon of red lanterns announces a less familiar, but just as exciting landmark, London's Chinatown.

Its origins traced back to Chinese seafarers working the trade roots of the British Empire.

Men who came ashore with tea and spices in the holds and built a sense of home through food.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (lively music) My guide today is Angela Hui, whose book, "Takeaway," is about growing up in a Chinese restaurant family in Wales.

- [Angela] So this is a place where people are kind of coming and going in all directions in terms of where they're going.

- I love that.

So, like, Chinatown is at the heart of London and London culture.

Like, you can't avoid it.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, you can't.

(upbeat music) - [Danielle] How did Chinatown end up in such a central part of London where rents are highest?

You know, you often see Chinatowns on the periphery.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it used to be on the periphery.

So it used to be based in the Limehouse so the Docklands in East London.

It's because, you know, Chinatown was created for the Chinese seamen that used to work on the boats.

They rebuilt Chinatown back in like about the '50s and the '60s after the war when they were kind of rebuilding everything.

It was an area that was quite like dangerous, there was a lot of triad gangs and, you know, it was areas where people actively avoided.

And then, slowly, over time, it became more and more popular and as the kind of city center would slowly shift.

Now a lot of people will come to Chinatown, have a meal here before going to see a show.

(intriguing music) But I love in Chinatown, you know, you get like burger and a lobster or Western, like Korea, and then you get these small little snack shops with like bubble tea and egg waffles.

- Look, anywhere you go, you see- - You still see the roast ducks.

- Roast ducks.

- Yeah.

- Roast pork.

That's when you know you're in Chinatown.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Anywhere around the world.

Well, I love this, Noodle and Beer.

- Noodle and Beer is good.

- That seems so London.

- Oh yeah, you've got like a karaoke soju place.

- Oh.

- Like you said, you still have your buffets, you got bubble tea.

Bubble wrap is like the new kind of egg waffles.

(dynamic music) Like you said, there's like pubs that sit next to casinos that sit next to Vietnamese restaurants as well as like Cantonese spots.

- Yeah, this is a true melting pot.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

In terms of restaurants, there's a high turnover in terms of different places that are always coming and going and closing, like this kind of place, for example, there's, like, that used to be a bubble tea place and obviously like replaced, so a lot of things have a quick turnover because of the high rents, there's short leases, so things turn around a lot.

- Yeah, well, it feels like Chinese culture is totally assimilated in London because you have your fish and chips.

- Yes, yes.

- And then, you have your spicy wontons and they go hand in hand.

- And it's delicious.

And I think it deserves its own place, in the culinary world, a lot of people say it's not real Chinese food, but it is, it's Chinese food made by Chinese people but just for a different- - Absolutely, born out of a different context.

- Exactly, exactly.

- It's British-Chinese food.

- Yeah, exactly, and I think it deserves some praise.

- Yeah.

(dynamic music continues) (uptempo music) - [Danielle] China Town has never stood still.

Angela's been documenting its changes for years.

And, today, she takes me to Bunhouse, home to Z He's famously molten egg custard baos.

(uptempo music continues) - [Z He] Should we do it together?

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- [Danielle] Show me how.

- [Z He] So each of the buns have a stamp of what the filling is.

- [Danielle] Ah.

- [Angela] So we have got lamb, pork, beef, mushroom, and chicken, and these two are custard.

- [Danielle] I'm gonna follow you, okay.

- [Z He] So, there's always this paper that people ask, "Is it okay?

I already ate it."

- All right, well, let's see your method.

- [Z He] I think the best way to eat it is to open the mouth.

- [Danielle] Mm-hm.

- [Z He] And then you've got a nice little custard pocket.

- [Danielle] I see.

- And then, you do this.

- [Danielle] That's so elegant and refined, how you're eating yours.

- [Z He] You don't waste any custard, that's the best part, right?

- Ooh.

- Yes.

(laughs) - Mm.

- [Z He] Without it going all over the place.

- [Danielle] I'm not as refined as you are, but I love the squirt.

Yeah, look at this one.

It's just bubbling up there.

What is this made of?

- The custard bun is basically egg and there was something that we put in there, coconut and carrot juice.

- [Danielle] Carrot juice?

- Which is more unusual as an item.

- It's literally finger-licking good.

- Yes.

And so, if anything, it was a battle at the beginning when I don't have any background in culinary, and we had to bring in some bao master, dim sum master to teach us or like to actually work out some of the more technical things.

And it was a battle to work with them, in terms of like, yeah, but try what I'm saying.

I'm not saying you're wrong or I'm not saying I'm right, but I think trying wouldn't harm anything.

That's the lamb.

- Right.

- [Angela] That's the beef, lamb is my favorite.

- Really?

- It's a cumin lamb bun.

- [Danielle] Wow.

- The idea was from the Xinjiang lamb skewer.

We worked so hard on kind of recreating some of the flavor profile.

We chargrilled the lamb belly, add extra sort of these yummy fats in there.

- It's delicious, it has like, I can taste the lardo and the texture of that fat melting in my mouth with the meat.

- That's what I wanted.

- That is delicious.

Bunhouse points to Chinatown's future, but Golden Phoenix is its backbone.

Open since 1994, the sprawling three story Cantonese restaurant looks like a set dresser's dream of a traditional Chinese restaurant.

When Marina Lai-Lentz's father passed away last year, she returned to London and stepped into the role he never wanted her to inherit, running the family restaurant.

I sit down with her to talk about what it means to take over an institution and how you carry a legacy forward in a city that never stops changing.

You know, I feel like any Chinatown you go to around the world, you see roasted ducks hanging in the window.

That's your sign that you've arrived in Chinatown.

But I've never seen duck prepared like this before.

You mentioned it's double fried?

- Yes.

So it's a special way of frying and roasting the duck.

And I like the story and the history of it because it's unique to the UK.

It started off in London Chinatown, when the immigrants first came over, they really wanted to serve the traditional peking duck.

Now the peking duck is delicious and it's refined, but it has to be served whole.

It wouldn't be, you know, presentable if it didn't come whole and then it's sliced, and I think you know how that looks.

But when they came here, when immigrants came here, they started off with small Chinese takeaways.

Now these Chinese takeaways, they couldn't turn over the ducks quickly enough.

They have to be served fresh, at the end of the day.

So they tried to find another creative way to serve these ducks, that would mean that the ducks had more longevity, but it would also mean that you didn't have to serve it whole.

So this is the really creative way of doing it, which is, you know, a roasted duck.

It's fried and roasted.

- [Danielle] That's very British, right?

To be double fried.

- [Marina] Yes, fried thing.

- [Danielle] And then.

- That's it, yes, yes.

- Pop it into your mouth.

- Immigrants came here and they had a very different life to the ones that they had at home.

So they had to adapt and they did, you know, Chinatown is thriving after all these years, so, yeah.

- How would you describe the British palate for Chinese food?

- What we've done really well is that we've brought over the kind of the classics that are similar to British food.

And now people are more adventurous because people travel more, because social media and TV are exposing people to different cultures more.

So we're kind of evolving into the more refined taste, and that's the kind of Chinese food that I really want everyone to know about.

We didn't grow up on the kind of greasy fried food that you see in a lot of Chinese takeaways and restaurants.

We grew up on very healthy, always a fish, a vegetable, steamed rice, that was our dinner, and a soup.

- What inspired you to follow in your father's footsteps?

- The thing is, if I was honest with myself, if my dad was still alive now, I don't think he would want me to do this.

He always said that he didn't, he wanted me to get a good education, and I think the immigrant mentality was they don't want their children to work as hard as they had to, you know, I'm sure it was the same for you.

So our parents worked really hard to give us, you know, a good education, a nice life.

And the last thing they want us to do is work as hard as they did.

But the thing that inspired me to continue his legacy was that I saw an opportunity to continue and evolve in a way that contributes to the landscape of Chinatown.

- You know, how do you hope to evolve?

- Being part of this Chinese culture is so much more than just, you know, putting food on the table and taking your money for it, you know?

Yes, it's a fair exchange and it's a good exchange, but there's so much more to Chinese eating culture, for example, I'm still trying to convince people to not order the same thing and not share their food, you know?

I'm trying to still get across the fact that we should be sharing our food.

My mom always says, you know, the higher you hold your chopsticks, the higher you are in society, and the lower you hold, she would always say, "Don't hold your chopsticks so low, you are not a peasant," you know?

(all laughing) So even these little quirks about Chinese culture are really interesting.

One dish of steamed, fried and then sweet is up there.

So it's taking inspiration from the British classics and showing people that Chinese food can still be very delicate and it doesn't have to be the kind of big chunks of chicken ball with gravy all over it.

So that was the food that got us into this country, but this is the food that I would like people to remember us for.

I need to reclaim that part of my culture, and I try and wear, you know, clothes designed by Chinese designers, I try to watch programs made by Chinese people because I want so much of that back.

We spent too long kind of putting that away and sweeping that under the rug.

And I know that that was part of what our parents wanted, but it's a different time now.

And I often say, you know, our parents' generation walked so that we could run and now we really need to run with it, you know?

They built the foundations, they fed us, they gave us the clothes on our backs, and now is our time to kind of make our culture something positive that people can learn from and people can benefit from as well.

(pleasant music) - [Danielle] At Peninsula London, a Hong Kong-based hotel, tea appears in polished silver and hushed rooms.

This is the version most Britons recognize.

The ingredient became British through empire.

First through trade with China and later through colonial control of tea in India.

To make sure I don't commit any social crimes, I've enlisted my friends Andy and Yen to teach me the local etiquette.

Andy's English, Yen moved here from Hong Kong, yet it's Yen who knows the rules best.

- So for a man, when you take your napkin, you fold it this way and the fold is towards you.

Whereas with a woman, it's this way.

- Oh, really?

Why is that?

- Yeah.

And the reason being is because when you want to dab on your lipstick or your food, it's on the underside, so that you don't get to see it.

They use fine bone China, so you would put the milk in afterwards because it wouldn't crack, whereas with those that weren't of an affluent family would have the milk in first, so that the China doesn't crack or the cup doesn't crack.

- Oh.

So, traditionally, are you supposed to add cream, milk and sugar to the tea?

- Now, that's personal preference.

After you've added the sugar and the milk, you don't stir like this or like this, you sort of move it back and forth like this.

You know what?

I'll have the cucumber sandwich.

- [Danielle] You can't just like pile it on like a buffet.

- No, you can't.

Yeah, it's not a buffet, it's a tea.

- [Danielle] Oh, okay.

We have cucumber sandwiches.

- [Yen] Egg and cress, salmon and probably smoked cheese and chicken and probably celery.

- What are we supposed to drink with the sandwiches?

- So you can have the tea or you can have the champagne.

Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't.

But it's a great way to get hammered.

(both laughing) Typically, when you cheer, you just cheer like this.

- Oh really?

- Without clinking the glass, yeah.

- [Danielle] That's really a faux pas to clink the glass, right?

- Well, no, you can, but I mean, typically, it's a little bit more sort of refined.

- Think about product design.

Somebody actually thought this is the perfect size, it's the most elegant way to eat, it's small enough so I don't have to open my mouth so large, I'm never gonna make a mess.

It's perfect.

- [Danielle] You know, I feel like a little girl playing in a dollhouse, you know?

With the porcelain plates.

- I love that.

And the real heart of this experience is a cup of tea, a group of friends, a moment in time, and then a bit of sweetness.

When you strip away everything.

- [Yen] Yes.

- That's the heart of this.

And you can solve everything.

- [Both] Yeah.

- [Andy] You can solve the world's problems with a cup of tea.

- [Danielle] For a lot of the Asian cooks in the UK, tea isn't a spectacle, it's everyday life.

This morning, I'm trading hotel China for a kitchen table.

Emily and Amy Chung, known as the Rangoon Sisters, are London-born Burmese doctors turned supper club chefs cooking the food they grew up with, including a tea leaf salad.

Joining us is Tiffany Chang, a Taiwanese British cook, who takes the same idea in another direction, folding Oolong and Assam tea into tiramisu, reworking a European classic through an Asian lens.

(joyful music) - It doesn't look very much like tea.

- No.

- You probably think, what is that?

And it's very green and sort of very mossy colored, but this is what comes out after they ferment the fresh tea leaves, basically, and they leave it for weeks.

We've got some crispy deep fried beans with some peanuts, over here as well, some roasted peanuts and we've got some sesame seeds.

And then, with Burmese cooking, you're always gonna have some garlic 'cause we love garlic and we've got some raw cabbage as well to add some extra fresh crunch.

And you might also have some chili as well with it.

- Mm.

- And so, that's the way that it's often sort of put together as well and enjoyed, and we like it like that the best, I think.

(gentle music) - [Emily] I suppose comparing it to tea here, like, we really chew it down and make its flavor stronger, I think, with the pickled, it's like, it's been allowed to really brew.

- [Danielle] Yeah.

- And then, with the combination that you mix it with, it's strong, it's umami, it's pungent.

Whereas drinking tea is sort of lighter and it's just really different, so I feel like we're bringing something different to tea that maybe like when the British got into it, you know, this was happening, but they wouldn't, it was too much for them.

So, now, they're ready.

(gentle music continues) Okay.

- [Danielle] It's an explosion of flavors in my mouth.

I mean, I'm tasting the peanuts and then the crunch from the cabbage and then the tea leaves are really strong.

- Yeah.

- Kind of pungent flavor to it that I love.

It's like this hits all your flavor notes.

- Mm.

- Mm.

Yum.

- I went to Paris a couple years ago and I tasted this amazing tiramisu from this Japanese chef and he used Japanese roasted tea and I loved it so much, I thought when I came back to London, I wanted to create my own version of it using Taiwanese, a combination of Taiwanese Oolong and Assam tea to soak the lady fingers in.

(upbeat music) It's gonna be served with a quite sweet soy caramel, but we could kind of control that.

- [Danielle] Soy caramel?

- Yeah, so it's a simmered down reduction of sugar, a little bit of water and aged soy from this really small manufacturer in Taiwan.

This soy is also made with black treacle, which is quite common here in England.

- What is that?

- It's like a very concentrated black sugary thing, isn't it?

- Yeah, I guess almost a bit like molassesy.

- Yeah, very molassesy.

- I like that.

- [Tiffany] It's got a really nice toasty flavor to it.

- [Emily] Yeah.

- I love it, it's much lighter than a traditional tiramisu, it's not as sweet.

The umami from the soy caramel, ooh.

Mwah.

- Cheers.

- Cheers!

- [Danielle] What an authentically London experience.

- [Both] Yeah.

(lively music) - Tea tells one side of Britain's imperial story, how foreign goods were refined and absorbed into polite society.

Spices tell another.

If tea was poured in drawing rooms, curry was cooked in back kitchens and eventually in restaurants that fed the nation.

Curry, of course, isn't a single dish, it's a British construct, a catch-all term shaped by the need to make vastly different regional cuisines legible to a British palate.

What Britain came to call curry grew out of The Raj, and later out of the labor of South Asian migrants, cooks who adapted their food to survive.

Over time, those adaptations become comfort food and then something Britain claimed as its own.

But behind the dish is a harder history of racism and endurance.

With British Sri Lankan cook and writer Thuli Weerasena as my guide, I'm walking Brick Lane, also known as the Curry Capital of London, to understand how this food reshaped local taste buds.

- Nearly every shop front or restaurant is a curry house on this road.

- Every shop front seems to be the best curry house.

- Yeah.

(both laughing) - Before this area was home to quite a big Jewish community, and then in the '60s and '70s, there was a big movement of Bangladeshi people.

(uptempo music) The first sort of pioneers who started the curry house restaurants, they came up with a winning formula and they told their cousins, their uncles, their brothers, you know, wider family, who were coming over to the UK, about how they could set up a business.

And you know, they had this winning formula, this menu that was easy for British people to understand, they liked the food.

- [Danielle] Far from the crowds of Brick Lane, in leafy Clapham, Prince Durairaj is doing something different.

At Tamila, he steps away from the stereotypical construct of curry and cooks from a specific place, South India.

The food is built around buttery, paper-thin rotis, just the way his mother taught him.

- Actually, here is my hometown chicken curry, we give them boneless chicken curry.

- There's been Indian restaurants in London for, you know, closing on 200 years.

And so, now you've seen this increase in the variation.

- [Danielle] Wow.

- And I would just say, I'd go in with your hands and like dip it in, get some curry.

- All right, let's try this.

It's unlike any, you know, chicken curry that I usually have.

Just this makes me so happy to eat this, you know?

- That's good.

- It's a modern curry dosa kal, it's my hometown this also, like, we serve with a coconut chutney, like, in English, we say like a pancake.

- [Danielle] Oh.

- [Prince] Like made of rice and lentil pancake, like a dosa.

And hand chopped meat and cooked it with lots of masalas, make it dry meat, and add coconut oil and coconut chutney.

- How would you describe this whole new genre of curry houses popping up in London?

- People in London now know so much about the food and especially Indian food, either they've, you know, traveled to India or, you know, seen it online, there's TV shows, and there's been a big increase in awareness of, you know, these different types of foods and people will seek that out nowadays.

A lot of immigration in the '70s for people to work in kind of textiles and factories.

But then, there was a lot of unemployment in the '70s, so people had to find a way of making money and they turned to running restaurants.

They exploded in popularity because it was a new food to a lot of Brits, you know?

- Right.

- [Thuli] This kind of spicy curry with rice, you know, it wasn't what people were eating back then.

- Right.

- But now it is, now it's so familiar.

- Yeah.

- But it's been a journey to get to that point.

- My final stop in London takes me to another cuisine shaped by British colonial rule, At Mambow, Chef Abby Lee serves up unapologetically bold Malaysian food.

The flavors are direct, sarawak peppers, kashmiri chilies, ingredients that once moved through imperial trade routes.

Pepper, in particular, sits at the center of Britain's imperial story.

For Anna Sulan Masing, a Malaysian-Iban writer, whose family grew pepper and sarawak, the spice is more than a condiment, it is a reminder that the spice celebrated in British kitchens today came from indigenous farms, shaped by colonial demand.

Today, a new generation of Asian chefs is working with that inheritance in deciding how the story gets told.

- I would really love for people just to then think about the everyday things that they eat, like pepper, and think about that it's got a history, that labor has been put into this, like, how much these small ingredients matter to a whole line of people.

(bright music) 90% of Malaysian pepper is sarawak pepper.

It is, you know, really worldwide accepted as one of the best peppers.

It's very aromatic, it's very distinctive in that sense and in that way.

- So over here, we've got some salted egg fried sardines, with a pickled Tokyo turnip with some curry leaves and just a bit of the sarawak pepper as the background.

We've got a grilled quail, so this is done in like the traditional hawker-style marinade.

And then the Otak-Otak prawn toast, and that's got a bit of the sarawak black peppercorn in the sort of rempah or spice mix, as we like to call it, we've got a barbecue sambal skate wing, and that's wrapped in banana leaf, quite traditionally grilled over the coals.

And here we've got the pepper clams.

This is basically the mix of white and black peppercorns.

That's the hot and sour beef curry, so the asam pedas.

I think all like the basis of every sauce is actually really traditional.

Perhaps the presentation has just tweaked a little bit.

- What inspired you to put your identity on a plate, so to speak?

- You know, I've spent so many years cooking western food, like Italian, French food and, you know, as you get older, you sort of start craving, well, flavors that you grew up with.

And so, it's just been a three-year journey of going home and rediscovering the flavors and the recipes and reconnecting with family as well, and digging through old photos of my grandma and just trying to find out, you know, what do we eat when we were growing up?

Because I've been away from home for over 15 years now.

And there's so much meaning to presenting this food and letting, you know, people here understand the nuances, the regional nuances of Malaysia.

- So good.

(bright music continues)