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“I have a pet peeve about Chinese festivals,” says Amy Poon, gathering coriander and spinach into bunches in her west London kitchen. “I get asked for stuff at Chinese New Year and I’m always laughing. I’m like, ‘You know that the Chinese do eat the other 11 months and two weeks of the year?’ A lot of the Chinese festivals are fetishised. It’s all been a bit Crazy Rich Asian-ised; I know very few families that sit around the table wrapping dumplings together.”
Poon is the daughter of Bill Poon who, from the 1970s to the ’90s was the king of British Chinese restaurants. With Poon’s of Covent Garden he earned the first Michelin star for a Chinese restaurant in the world, which was beloved of Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery and Barbra Streisand, among others, and expanded to Geneva.
Poon spent a long time evading her culinary destiny but finally succumbed when she opened a pop-up restaurant in Clerkenwell in 2018; she set up her own Chinese sauce-making business in 2022, and is now launching a permanent new Poon’s in Somerset House. When I meet her, just ahead of its 5 November opening, she seems remarkably unfazed, as does her husband, former financier-turned-wine specialist Michael Mackenzie, who is overseeing the restaurant’s wines.
Tonight they are hosting a relaxed “winter meal” in their open-plan kitchen. Central to the table is the steamboat, a pan of bubbling water into which myriad ingredients are being added, boiled and then handed around to be dipped in sauces and enjoyed.
“A steamboat is a really lovely way to eat in the winter, because it’s like the whole fondue thing. Everyone’s around the boiling cauldron,” says Poon. “It’s all poached, which sounds like it’s going to taste of nothing, but with Chinese food everything is marinated. And there’s no carbs. We’ve got pork tenderloin, rump steak, chicken and wood ear mushrooms, bok choy, tofu, glass noodles and a whole array of vegetables; then we’ve got prawns and clams and scallops and meatball mix. I’m not going to make a broth, I’m literally going to smack a big piece of ginger and throw it in the pot with hot water. Because it’s like the magic stone. By the time you’ve had everything in there, the soup becomes really, really flavourful.” The rest, she says, is all about the dipping sauces: “Ginger spring-onion relish, a seasoned soy sauce, some sauce with fermented tofu and one of our Poon’s chilli oils.”
“Steaming is my favourite way of cooking,” she continues. “I think it’s magical; it’s really feminine, very subtle and quiet. It’s not this towering inferno of fire. It’s very jovial and communal. I’ve always said it’s a great thing to do if you’ve got difficult in-laws. Or if you’ve got people you don’t know very well coming for dinner, because then there’s something to do.”
Tonight’s guests – all good friends – include the eminent travel writer Colin Thubron and his wife the Shakespeare scholar Margreta de Grazia, Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Tash Aw, food writer Fuchsia Dunlop, author Paul French and SOAS student Alegra Giercke, whose family runs the Genghis Khan Retreat in Mongolia. Their conversation ranges from the intellectual to the naughty, taking in Wham!’s tour to China in the 1980s and how to cook a Mongolian camel’s pizzle along the way.
With the steamboat bubbling, the food keeps on coming and the talk flows, fortified by Mackenzie’s wine. His selection puts the emphasis on cool-climate bottles, including Chinese-American maker Jade Gross’s Chiguita (“I’m such a fan girl, it’s literally embarrassing,” says Poon), Weingut Joh Jos Prüm’s flinty Sonnenuhr Spätlese, Palestinian maker Taybeh Winery’s Nadim, a fortified Spanish montilla and – a nod to de Grazia’s Sicilian heritage – a Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso.
To mark the feast’s end, the broth is served with rice noodles as a soup. And the evening concludes with jasmine tea, served in cups and saucers Poon found in a second-hand shop in Singapore, alongside traditional seasonal Chinese mooncakes, brought as a present by Aw, and pandan chiffon cake – light, airy and, as per Aw, “slightly trashy” – but universally devoured.
Poon’s at Somerset House is available to book on OpenTable
FT Appetites, which brings together stories from FT Magazine, HTSI and FT Globetrotter, is supported by OpenTable. The FT does not earn a commission from any booking page links included in this article and all content is editorially independent
