West Lake has been around for two or three decades, and in that time it’s had good patches and bad patches. It’s now in a good patch, so five of us visited for a weekday dinner just after the winter solstice.
The first thing to know is that West Lake has two fairly different menus. If you’re a big-nosed customer, like I am, they hand you a menu loaded with prawn toast and similar Aussie Chinese stuff. If you want a more interesting choice, you can ask for the Chinese menu. It has a wider range of food, and it helpfully provides English translations of everything. The two menus are bound in different colours, I can never remember which one’s which. If you’re not sure which one you’ve got, just flip through and see whether your menu includes a page of congee – only the Chinese menu has that.
After a bit of discussion, we ordered five dishes: lamb hot-pot; beef brisket with radish; eggplant with minced pork and fish sauce; pi-pa bean curd; and snow-pea shoots with dried scallop.
Normally in a Cantonese restaurant I avoid lamb. In pastoral Northwestern China, lamb is a popular meat, especially among Muslims, and I’ve enjoyed many lamb dishes from that region. By contrast, the Pearl River delta is not prime sheep territory, so the locals don’t traditionally each much of it. There are, however, exceptions. In winter, some Cantonese restaurants offer a warming hot-pot of lamb or goat, and West Lake offers a very good version of this. The meat is on the bone, and slow-cooked until it’s falling off the bone. Extra flavour comes from dried beancurd skin and other ingredients, so the meat sits in a rich dark broth. It hits the spot on a cold winter’s night. One detail – I don’t think the lamb hot-pot is on either menu. It’s a seasonal special listed in Chinese on the wall, and also on a specials insert you might get with the menu.
