Andrew Wong builds a new menu around Chinese food textures
A. Wong's Collections of China tasting menu, launching this month in Pimlico after a two-month refit, organises courses by mouthfeel rather than region or ingredient.
Andrew Wong is putting the textures of Chinese cooking centre stage this month, with a new Collections of China tasting menu opening at A. Wong in Pimlico after a two-month refit.
The menu builds each course around a specific textural contrast prized in Chinese cuisine rather than a region or a single ingredient: the soft, almost gelatinous give of collagen-rich cuts like sea cucumber set against the springy, elastic resistance known as "Q" in hand-pulled noodles.
It sits alongside, rather than replaces, the restaurant's existing tasting menu, now renamed Collections of A. Wong, and the dim sum lunch service continues unchanged on Wilton Road.
The soft, yielding mouthfeel of sea cucumber against the elastic 'Q' of hand-pulled noodles.
The refit brought in a new show kitchen designed by SHW Design, built so diners can watch the noodle-pulling and knife work that the new menu is built around, and an interior update from Michaelis Boyd.
Texture as the organising idea, not a garnish
Western tasting menus tend to organise courses around protein or season. Collections of China instead asks what a dish feels like in the mouth first, then builds flavour around that, a structure closer to how texture is discussed in Chinese culinary writing than how most London kitchens plan a menu.
Wong has spent fifteen years at A. Wong arguing that Chinese cooking in London gets flattened into a handful of familiar dishes. A menu organised around mouthfeel rather than recognisable names is a harder sell to book, but a clearer way to show what the cuisine does that others do not.
A slower reopening than most refits
Two months is a long closure for a restaurant that depends on repeat lunch trade, time Wong used to rebuild the kitchen around the new menu rather than simply repaint the dining room. Dishes include a red mullet sandwich and a take on cocido madrileño, drawn from Wong's own travels through Paris, Milan, Madrid and Hong Kong, served upstairs at the new Moga bar.
Whether diners read the textural framing or just taste the results, London's wider wave of modern Chinese openings, from Soho's bao counters to Pimlico's tasting menus, suggests the city's appetite for this kind of specificity is growing rather than plateauing.
