Having impressed our panel of judges, chef Guirong Wei tells of her journey from a mountain village to her brilliant Bloomsbury restaurant
While Sichuanese cuisine has been well known in London for more than a decade, the food of China’s great northwest was almost unknown until a few years ago, when word began to spread of the irresistible noodles served in a tiny snack shop near the Emirates Stadium. Xi’an Impression was co-founded by chef Guirong Wei, and her signature dish was biang biang noodles, hand-pulled ribbons of dough that are slapped on a counter-top (producing the “biang biang” sound of their name), before being boiled, topped with chilli and garlic and then finished with a fizz of sizzling-hot oil. They take pride of place on the menu, alongside other Xi’an snacks such as potsticker dumplings, slippery “cold-skin” noodles and Xi’an hamburgers (handmade flatbreads stuffed with pulled pork or cumin-scented beef). Earlier this year, Wei opened her first solo restaurant, the larger Master Wei, in Bloomsbury. Both specialise in the famous “flour-foods” (mianshi) of Xi’an, ancient Silk Road metropolis, capital of modern Shaanxi province and home of the first emperor’s Terracotta Army.
The Xi’an food I miss most is shuipen yangrou, a soup of slow-cooked lamb finished with slippery noodles and coriander
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