Last Updated on June 17, 2025
A Soho Noodle Explosion at Songhelou!
It’s an exciting time for Londoners interested in regional Chinese cuisine. The latest restaurant to tempt our tastebuds with new flavours and culinary concepts is Songhelou London, where we have been invited to review.
The original Songhelou restaurant is in the ancient city of Suzhou in the Jiangnan region, a foodie nexus south of the Yangtze River that includes Shanghai. Songhelou has been serving the locals top-end Suzhou cuisine for over 250 years, from the early period of the Qing Dynasty. It is a very well-respected restaurant in China with the cuisine focusing on freshness and delicate textures, and flavours; sweet and sour sauces are a favourite. Suzhou itself was a large and important city named the ‘Venice of the East’ by Marco Polo in the 13th century and is now famous for its collection of over 60 classical gardens, which form an UNESCO World Heritage Site. I’m ashamed to say that I had never heard of Suzhou or Jiangnan and am fascinated to see what is on offer.
The restaurant has launched its first international outpost, Songhelou London, in the Chinatown stretch of Soho’s Wardour St., close to both Leicester Square and Piccadilly tube stops. It’s a big space in a bustling part of town with three floors that can soak up 144 guests. The interior brings together Jiangnan water-town design features, ‘such as wooden furniture, porcelain tableware, ornate window railings, and Chinese calligraphy and paintings.’ The ground floor is where young Chinese diners and inquisitive others like myself sit on banquettes or on wooden stools with handy lids so that handbags can be stored safely inside.
There is a central kitchen, and the room buzzes with a canteen-like energy.
The 1st floor with its fabulous view over Chinatown feels more elegant and refined. However, we sat on the ground floor to get a bird’s eye view of the action in the kitchen.
The starters seemed pretty familiar. 5-spice ‘vegetarian chicken’ tofu was soft textured and juicy with a gentle 5-spice flavouring. Some excellent salt and pepper king prawns were hot and crisp, straight out of the fryer and with a light spicy coating and served with spring onion and chilli flakes. Gently pickled cucumber sticks with pickled chilli and garlic freshened the mouth, and a side of thin-sliced Jinzhen mushrooms was a slithery umami treat. We should have been drinking tea to accompany the meal, but I’m not much of a tea drinker. Wine is only available by the bottle, which would have been a mistake, but there were beers or soft drinks available, so we ended up drinking a fruity KSF plum drink and a YS Coconut drink.
For the main course, it’s all about noodles, noodles and more noodles. Since noodles are very on trend, with Chinatown full of establishments packed with happy young slurpers, this is probably a very smart move. Songhelou serves Suzhou-style noodles, which are thin and wheat-based. They are served in either a red or white sauce, essentially a delicate broth, a bit like a spicy consommé or tossed in a ‘fragrant oil.’ Noodles are accompanied by a choice of proteins such as Suzhou-style braised pork, stir-fried crab meat and roe, sizzling eel slices in oil or flavoured crayfish.
I chose the ‘Sweet and Sour Squirrel-Shaped Bass’, the restaurant’s signature dish. It looked extraordinary. The whole fish has been deep-fried with the batter and flesh twisted into swirls, edamame beans in the eye sockets, and then slathered with a gentle deep-orange sweet and sour sauce that is something of a ’70s throwback. It was fun to eat, and the oil-tossed noodles, topped with a sprinkling of cabbage, were full of wheat flavour and oily spice.
My companion had the boneless fried roast duck with soft-textured flesh, a crunchy exterior and plenty of flavour. The accompanying red sauce noodles were delicious, with the stock being subtly flavoured with many layers of flavour suggesting a blending of different stocks in a multi-day process.
There are a handful of desserts. We tried the mini rice balls with red bean paste, with the gloopy paste being a little underpowered for my Western palate.
From the video playing in Songhelou, it seems that the original restaurant has a more sophisticated offer beyond the noodles, and maybe in time, some more of those dishes could be brought in for the upstairs, which would widen the restaurant’s appeal. But for now, the noodles will do just fine!
Songhelou
22 Wardour Street,
Soho,
London,
WID 6QQ
02045312678
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