Wun’s is the relaunch of the Bun House team’s original Old Compton Street site and makes a promising first impression. Kitted out like an old-style Hong Kong street café, duck-egg green floors and walls contrast with dark wood and vintage fixtures. But there’s more to Wun’s than this pretty ground floor. Follow the darkly lit staircase and you’ll find a much larger restaurant and cocktail bar in the basement where the 1930s Hong Kong theme is continued with loud Cantonese music and neon signage.
Unfortunately, the interior design was the most alluring thing about our experience. Dishes are selected by ticking off items with a pencil on a paper menu, but staff seemed confused about suggesting how much we should order.
Fried rice topped with crisp lardons and sweet shallots was the best thing we ate and so good we ordered it twice. ‘Gran’s secret recipe sour plum duck’, sadly, seemed mostly to comprise of bones and fat, though the few bits of meat we could find did have the melt-in-the-mouth quality we hoped the whole dish would have.
Barbecue beef spare ribs, meanwhile, were overcooked to the point of being inedible, though the marinade went down a treat with the second portion of lardon fried rice. To finish, we ordered traditional egg tarts which had a creamy and sweet filling encased in very dry pastry, and a portion of salted duck-egg ice-cream in which you couldn’t have missed the salt.
Still, you could just stick with rice dishes. There is also Iberico char siu fried rice, soy-braised aubergine rice and slow-cooked pumpkin and flower mushroom rice, while a claypot rice set lunch offers a choice of three rice dishes with cucumber salad and a glass of rice wine for £15.80.