Usually Chinese restaurants are full of cheesy kitsch and serve a very European version of Asian food, overloaded with glutamte and artificial flavors. Fortunately there are exceptions like the No. 27 Restaurant.
The name of the restaurant comes – hello creativity! – from the house number. It prides itself to serve original asian food, with a focus on Sichuan kitchen. Well, I’ve never been in Sichuan and so can’t really compare whether it is authentic or not, but still: My taste buds are intact 🙂 From outside it looks like every other restaurant in the area. Inside it is refreshingly minimalisitc. No kitsch, no red dragons, no weird music.
I especially liked the big round tables with the rotating plate in the middle, what makes sharing easier. The personnel is very friendly and modest, very nice people. We first tried some starters:
This was just amazing! The green peppers were first very fruity on the tongue and then exploded like glass on the palate. The pepper sauce added a very hot and dense aroma to the more „green“ notes of the chilis. Very hot, very spicy – but it didn’t burn your throat for long, after some seconds just the excellent taste stayed.
They also offer a wide variety of dim sum. These were just great, not at all slimy but just perfectly steamed. The inside had shrimps and wild garlic, a very pleasant combination.
Two great choices for sald: The beef salad was just amazing – the different textures of meat and tripe added up to a great mouthfeel. Together with this very taste sauce it was a beautiful experience. The seaweed salad had this weird combination of sweet, sour and spicy at the same time. No comparison to ready-to-eat wakame, it was very complex in taste and crunchy in texture. Nice!
This turned out to be quite different from what I had expected: I thought the chicken would be in greater bits…finally it was tiny, tiny fried shreds of chicken. They were very crunchy, fatty bits of something – you wouldn’t recognise them as meat after all. They were mixed with a HUGE (!) amount of small fried chillies and different peppers. Eaten with rice it is a rather dry, a little bit oily way of preparation. But I was astonished by the beautiful taste. Again the chilis exploded in my mouth, this time together with the aromatic taste of the different Sichuan peppers, that were not hot but very complex in their taste. A very interesting and nice dish. I couldn’t eat everything up and took the rest with me – which I ate with noodles the other day (even better than with rice!).
A rather conventional dish, the beef was good though (maybe a bit too hard), the oyster sauce added a pleasent umami-note. Nice but not more.
This one was quite good, again it was a „dry“ preparation – but the cumin came out quite well and added up very pleasant with the lamb’s meat. Surprisingly the rucola with it’s black pepper notes fittet quite well.
Finally some Chinese-restaurant-standard: The mango pudding 🙂 This one was quite nice though…
No 27 Restaurant offers a lot of other offal dishes and a wide variety of Sichuan-style dishes that seem definetely worth trying. The prices are definetely higher than in your „normal“ Chinese place next door, but the portions are quite big and most of the things tasted very unusual and nice. For 2 Persons you should calculate 40€ including drinks.
