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The first time I came to A. Wong was shortly after it opened, in the afterglow of the Olympics in early 2013. I was living down the road in Dolphin Square and Wilton Road was the nearest thing I had to a high street. If you were being nice you’d say this is Pimlico, although it’s really Victoria, which for all its shiny, Nova-ish newness will never be a restaurant destination.
As Coal Drops Yards at King’s Cross proves, people like restaurant districts that look as if they’ve been around for years, however ersatz the heritage. Kym’s, the restaurant that A.Wong replaced, really had been around for years. It was a classic high-street Cantonese owned by chef Andrew Wong’s parents.
If the name sounds familiar, that’s because Kym’s has just been reincarnated by Wong in the Bloomberg Arcade in the City, another shiny new restaurant development with about as much atmosphere as the moon. Victoria might never be a restaurant destination, but who needs choice when you have one modern classic?
Between finishing his anthropology degree at the LSE and taking over Kym’s from his parents, Wong travelled around China to explore the byways of regional Chinese cooking.
The...