Chinatown Bakery
“For them the world is a prison without bars.”
Laing
John Milton, commenting on mankind’s ability to paint the turd and turd the painting, once wrote “the mind is in itself its own place, and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Unfortunately, no feat of perceptual realignment can make visiting Leicester Square a bearable experience. It is the cesspool of London: polluted by the faeces of tourism, echoing with the flatulence of commerce and oozing with the stench of society’s weekend overindulgences.
Chinatown Bakery stands, stalwartly, in a courtyard a couple of turns away from the station. The nondescript facade is large and daunting. It has been busy when I have passed it on the other occasions when fate’s fingers have conspired to manhandle me to this part of town. Thankfully, it is quiet at 11am on a drizzly Sunday morning — the red lanterns overhead become increasingly damp as benches no one will sit on are erected.
When I walk through the threshold, a variegated buffet of unfamiliar options instils me with the potent awareness that I am almost certainly doomed to make an inept choice. The offerings — strangely coloured and ambiguously named — are illuminated by lights who’s hue would befit an operating theatre.
The confectionary on display is the end product of a brutally efficient factory line. The tranquillised amble of weekend perusers contrasts sharply with the aggressive gait of the expeditious employees delivering an endless stream of buns, cakes and strange sustenance to the showroom. The guts of this machine are laid bare in the room that contains the tills: aluminium ovens; an infinity of sleek metal trays; and a perpetual supply of products.
But, just because it is industrial, it does not mean it is inhumane — when you intercept one of the machine’s moving parts, they are receptive and kind. One of my targets — a peanut cream roll— was not in the shelves when I arrived: but, when I enquired, it was produced with a magician’s flurry. I also detach a roast pork roll from the shelves — as a savoury counterbalance.
The bakery runs a takeaway only service, and so I amble back out into the rain that seems to hang in the air more than fall to the ground — as if it too was desperately repelled by its surroundings. Scaffolding provides the only seat in the immediate vicinity.
The roast pork bun is decent but not spectacular. In the time it took to jot down some of these worthless musings, its filling has gone cold — but the tangy flavour and soft firmness suggest a former glory that I could have enjoyed if I had not waited so long. I do not know whether a consumer would need the blind luck of encountering a freshly baked batch to experience it at its thermal pinnacle, or if the bakery has some means of preserving the temperature throughout the day. The bread that surrounds the filling is impossibly soft; although lurking within it is some ambiguous thin sheet of texture that is slightly off-putting.
The peanut cream bun is a rare beauty of a baked good. Its top is encrusted with crispy fragments of salty nut and soft whispers of coconut creaminess that disrupt the sleek softness of the whipped cream within. The dough is closer to a harnessed cloud than a product of bacterial culturing and mechanical leavening — providing a perfect bed for the other flavours to writhe together upon. The strange texture is absent in the sweet offering; nothing detracts from its straightforward beauty.
Chinatown Bakery is at the stark but cheerful end of the bakery spectrum: unfurnished, unfrivolous and brutally efficient. But the confectionary experience is just as potent as at other more refined institutions. There is an association between artisanal craft and the quality of the delectable in baking circles — which Chinatown Bakery, thankfully, disrupts. Although its production of cloudy delicacies is mechanical, the end product is just as delicious as those produced in its pretentious, rustic counterparts. Perhaps it is even more praiseworthy, given that the average price of a roll is £2. I could have eaten myself into the bliss of a coma for the same price as I paid for a coffee and a medium sized slice of apple tart last month at L’Eto.
