New Sum Ye, B105 Arcadian Centre, 70 Hurst Street, Birmingham B5 4TD. Tel: 0121 622 1525
7/10
China Town Noodle Bar, Unit 2 Bath Passage, Ladywell Walk, Birmingham B5 4SZ. Tel: 0121 622 4746
5/10
If you had a tenner to spend on lunch, where would you go in Birmingham?
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It’s not much of an offer, at least on the face of it. But stick with me.
There are places where you can pick up an okay burger and fries for £10 and I can think of one place where I would go and eat fish and chips. For my sins, I haven’t been to the legendary Bedders (“This is Bedders”) in Small Heath, so there may be two.
There are several pasta places, most of them chains, most of them pointless other than as places to shelter from the rain. There are some cafes where you can get a homemade quiche or a wet panini or a salad. A salad. Hmm. That’s what I’m getting at. Who wants to go out and eat a salad?
There are some pubs where you can get a sandwich or a pie and chips or sausage and mash but I am not including pubs for two reasons: first, you can’t really go into a pub and not have a pint or two (and that puts you well over of the £10 bracket); and second, including pubs in this debate undermines my entire argument because you can get a competitively priced, and sometimes tasty, bite in a pub. So pubs are out.
The point I am trying to make is that there aren’t many places worth going to if your budget is limited to a tenner. It’s an effort going out. I eat out fairly regularly, although less than you might think, and I have to psyche myself up most times; sometimes I dread it.
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For this reason, I’d much rather save up my £10 in the hope that another £10 might come along and then I’d be in the market for a serviceable menu du jour. Because I don’t like eating out for eating out’s sake. I’d rather stay at home and have beans on toast. It’s not food snobbery. I don’t have enough money to be a food snob.
However, if there is one cuisine in the £10-a-head market that will get me to part with my money, or preferably someone else’s, it is Chinese food, specifically Chinese roast meats. Ahh, they’re just so uum, aren’t they? I will be genuinely excited, rather than depressed, by the prospect of what might be served up. Reality doesn’t always match expectation but there is something about Chinese roasts that bring out a Pavlovian pooch drooling reflex.
If you’ve felt the same urge to devour plates of juicy, sweet meat, doused in soy sauce and chilli oil, you’ve just gone: “Oh, yes.” If you haven’t gone, “Oh, yes” then go to New Sum Ye in Chinatown and find out what you’ve been missing.
I decided to pit this popular spot against one of its many colourful local competitors, China Town Noodle Bar, in an (almost) dish for dish dish-off.
First things first. New Sum Ye (NSY) and Noodle Bar are busy cafes rather than formal restaurant affairs, with prices to match. Expect hustle, bustle and clatter, a bit of elbowing, steam rising off wet overcoats and, most importantly, bags of aroma floating through the air.
Burnished, dark mahogany coloured ducks hang in the window at NSY. It’s a great way to advertise food and draw in punters, especially on a cold day. Psychologists could write “diner cognition studies” and cost-benefit analyses about the competitive advantage secured by restaurateurs mounting eye-catching window displays. Compare and contrast with the impact of looking at the front of a branded pasta house. Knock-out blow to China.
Orders are taken at the counter. There are some daily lunch specials as well as the main card. If it involves meat and rice/noodles, it is pretty much covered. You can get a whole Cantonese soya chicken for £14.50, a Cantonese roast duck for £18 or a “red-stewed” roast duck for £19.50. There are starters (crispy squid, butterfly prawns, crispy won-ton dumplings), “sizzling dishes” and curries etc but we had come for the fabled Cantonese triple roast. For £6.50, you get a large plate of freshly-cleavered roast duck, roast pork and crispy pork belly, slapped together on a pile of rice and dressed with a couple of pieces of pak choi. There are slatherings of savoury gravy.
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The duck was well flavoured and succulent, but I like a little more rendering of the fat. The crispy pork/siu yuk was juicy, mercifully not dried out or tired, with nice layers of milky fat and a couple of centimetres (so not too much) of properly crispy skin. I adore crispy skin but hate being short-changed with loads of it and no moist, fatty flesh. You may as well get a bag of pork scratchings.
Our favourite meat was the divine roast pork/char siu, the sweet, charred barbecuey loveliness of the exterior permeating the inner recesses of the flesh. Excellent rice, too.
We also split some whopping barbecued spare ribs, which come with a choice of sauces (lemon, syrup, sweet Peking or hot and spicy dry salted). We had the barbecue sauce. Irresistibly good. Seafood ho fun had plenty of okay quality king prawns, scallops and squid and moreish flat rice noodles.
The meat, though, is the deal and it’s a steal. With a £1 bottle of water each, the total bill for three was £35. Per head, that’s a little over a tenner (it’s £11.66) but close enough for farm work.
It was sub-zero outside when we visited the Noodle Bar, over the road in Bath Passage, but core body temperatures, if not extremities, were quickly restored by a large cups of Chinese tea (50p, including multiple refills).
There are so many dishes at the Noodle Bar. There are “big pot noodles” with roast meats, lamb brisket, haslet, cuttle fish balls, wontons, Vietnamese-style seafood, hot pots of bright hues and chow mein dishes and vegetables and “sizzling” specials and “chef’s recommendations” and so on. I can’t really say how these dishes compare with NSY because I was here on a roast meat mission. It is an extra pound for three roast meats and rice at the Noodle Bar (£7.50). I pushed the boat put with the four meats – duck, roast pork, crispy pork and soya chicken, for £8. I suspect the meats had been slammed in a microwave because the pork was no longer crispy. No crisp, no point. All the meats were moist, rather than dried out. A sign inside the cafe says all the roasts are cooked fresh every day.
The roast pork and chicken were the best of the quartet. The duck had good flavour but had not been as well cut as across the road at NSY. I don’t mind chewing bones. In fact, it’s part of the fun. But some of these were very sharp. The rice was second best to NSY, too. A touch of freshly grated ginger on the chicken was a nice, simple touch. I just wish the belly pork had been allowed to show its true potential.
We tried a noodle soup with, of course, roast meats, which had a slightly oily broth that cried out for some oomph. A chicken in black bean sauce with chow mein was fine. The bill for three, with tea and a couple of fruit juices, was £28.20.
Of the two places (and there are plenty more to try – and boy, do I need to), New Sum Ye rules the roost for roasts.
A word on service: in both cafes, the staff are unflinchingly kind and efficient. I don’t know but I suspect NSY and Noodle Bar are family concerns, which may explain why the servers are pleasant and helpful. They have a bond with the business and it shows.