It is doubtful many of us give thanks to the late Mao Zedong every time we order a Chinese meal but if anyone deserves credit for the ubiquity of Chinese food in Britain - the most popular cuisine here last year, with 109 million meals served - it is the late chairman of the Chinese Communist party. Prior to the revolution of 1949, Chinese eateries in Britain were, for the most part, a utilitarian affair, designed to serve the very basic needs of the small Chinese communities that grew up around the docks in Liverpool and London's Limehouse during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In 1908 Britain got its first mainstream Chinese restaurant when the Cathay opened just off London's Piccadilly Circus and it was joined in the 1930s by a couple of others in nearby Soho. Nevertheless Chinese food remained a curio in a gastronomically challenged country. The breakthrough came in 1951 when the British government finally recognised Mao's communist regime. The decision left the staff of the Chinese Embassy, regarded as functionaries of the now defunct Nationalist government, with a dilemma. They could not return to China, but they also needed new jobs. Catering was the way out. The embassy kitchens had chefs. The diplomats - among them one Kenneth Lo - were a resourceful lot. Together they went to work.
Those early restaurants that emerged across London in the 1950s had names like the Asiatic and the Good Friends, Shangri-La and the Good Earth. Later would come the Gallery and Rendezvous chains. All of them served only Cantonese food, just as the original eating houses in Limehouse had done - lots of lacquered meats, seafood, and vegetables in oyster sauce - because that was the region of China from which most of the chefs came. It is a feature of Britain's Chinese restaurants that endures to this day. 'To be honest the food was terrible,' says Deh-Ta Hsiung, a Chinese food writer and restaurant consultant. 'The only Chinese ingredient they had at the time was bean sprouts. There wasn't even real soya sauce.' It wasn't until the late 1950s and the arrival of the Hong Kong Emporium on London's Rupert Street that better ingredients became available in Britain.
In 1963 the now communist Chinese Embassy once again gave the business a boost when a group of Chinese restaurateurs managed to convince the ambassador's chef, a Mr Kuo from Beijing, to defect. They set him up with his own restaurant, the Kuo Yuan in North West London, and it soon became a huge hit, not least because he was serving the first Pekinese dishes Britain had ever seen, including Peking Duck. A visit by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, the Posh and Becks of their day, put both the restaurant and Chinese food on the map. When, in 1968, a hair salon designer called Michael Chow opened Mr Chow in Knightsbridge, soon frequented by the likes of Mick Jagger, Marlene Dietrich and the Beatles, Chinese food was finally established as a staple of British life.
While the years since have been ones of constant expansion - there are now 14,000 Chinese restaurants and takeaways in Britain - the quality and diversity of Chinese food is still patchy. 'You can get really top-notch Chinese food in Britain today,' says the cookery writer Fuchsia Dunlop, one of the few Europeans to have trained in China as a chef and the author of a book on Sichuan cookery. 'The problem is most of the customers are very ignorant and the restaurants can get away with serving them substandard food.' As she points out, China is a vast country with a more diverse cuisine than the whole of Europe. And yet we are fixed in a Cantonese rut. 'It's dishes like sweet and sour pork, chicken with cashew nuts and beef in black bean sauce which give Chinese food a bad name,' she says. Britain has also been responsible for a total fake: aromatic crispy duck served with pancakes, plum sauce and spring onions. In China the accessories only come with Peking Duck, an entirely different dish from the aromatic crispy variety, which is a dish from Sichuan.
There have been a few brave attempts to widen the repertoire. In 1981 Kenneth Lo, famous by then for his cookery books, opened Memories of China on London's Ebury Street, which introduced dishes from outside Canton. A few years later Christine Yau, who was eventually instrumental in setting up the first formal training course for Chinese chefs in Britain, took over a Soho restaurant called Ming (now Yming) and filled the menu with daring and unusual dishes from Northern China like Tibetan garlic lamb. 'I just felt we could do so much more with Chinese food,' she says. It was only this year, however, that the first entirely Shanghaiese restaurant, Ecapital, opened in London's Chinatown. For the most part, though, it is still Canton which holds sway. It may have been a Maoist revolution that got the Chinese restaurant boom started but since then revolutions have been more than a little thin on the ground. OFM
The lowdown
Five top Chinese restaurants
Royal China: 13 Queensway, London W2 (020 7221 2535)
Mandarin Kitchen: 14-16 Queensway, London W2 (020 7727 9012)
Phoenix Palace: 3-5 Glentworth Street, London NW1 (020 7486 3515)
Yang Sing: 34 Princess Street, Manchester (0161 236 5934)
Tai Pan: W. H. Lung Building, Great Howard Street, Liverpool (0151 207 3888)
Three non-Cantonese restaurants
Hunan (Spicy Western Chinese food): 51 Pimlico Road, London SW1 (020 7730 5712)
Ecapital (Shanghaiese): 8 Gerard Street, London W1 (020 7434 3838)
Yming (various): 35-36 Greek Street, London W1. (020 7734 2721)
Chinese fakes
Chop suey: Invented in the US to use up leftovers.
Aromatic crispy duck with pancakes: A cross between a Sichuan duck dish, not served with pancakes and Peking duck, which is.
Fuchsia Dunlop's hit list of dreadful British Chinese dishes
Prawn toast
Crispy seaweed
Sweet and sour pork
Beef in black bean sauce
Chicken with cashew nuts
Egg fried rice
Try these instead
Braised chicken feet
Crispy pig's intestines
Pressed pig's ear
Shredded jelly fish