When I wrote an extravagantly self-indulgent screed about a hangover the other week, I touched briefly on its eventual cure: Lilimi, a delivery-only dark kitchen in Bethnal Green sending out cheung fun and congee in disarmingly extravagant packaging.
And the packaging really is the thing. Every order comes neatly ensconced in a pristine white insulated bag, decorated with the Lilimi logo and designed to be reusable. Do I need a slowly growing collection of insulated cheung fun carrier bags? Clearly not, but I can’t help being charmed by the effort.
Each cheung fun tub comes branded too, along with three-step pictographic instructions for the novice cheung fun eater, though these essentially boil down to “pour the free sauce on top,” so I’m really not sure they needed to bother.
I suspect all this will be just a little divisive. I can easily imagine my dad having no truck with it, wondering just how much of a surcharge you’re paying for the pretty packing. The same will be true for the sorts whose approach to wine buying involves looking for the most boring label on the shelf, following the logic that all that money spent on design and aesthetics didn’t go into the actual food.
I’m sympathetic to the concern, not least because the obvious complaint to make about Lilimi is that it really is overpriced. And I don’t mean that in a “Chinese food should be cheap” way, nor am I about to recount how little I paid for the equivalents in Guangzhou — I just mean that anywhere that ends up costing £50 for a delivery breakfast for two should probably reevaluate a little.
Cheung fun starts at £6.90 for plain rolls, but climbs to a punchy £14.40 for a beef and egg version. That’s not a full meal’s worth of food, to be absolutely clear — you’ll want a couple per person, making Lilimi a pricey proposition unless you can nab it in an offer. You can see why I’d forgive someone glancing askew at the custom insulated bag now.
The thing is, the cheung fun are annoyingly good. Lilimi claims on its Instagram page to be “The first to bring authentic cheung fun to London,” and while I think that’s stretching things — the city has no shortage of decent dim sum with cheung fun included, and Lo’s Noodle Factory in Chinatown has been selling a good version to steam at home for years — it’s true that there aren’t many places so dedicated to it, and especially not that are open for breakfast.
They come either folded or pleated, which is primarily an aesthetic distinction — in this house we’re fans of the messy tangle of pleats, but your mileage may vary. Beef, pork, shiitake mushroom, and egg make up the filling options, and you can’t really go wrong with any, though I’m particularly fond of the egg addition, which is cooked right into the noodle strands, adding substance and flavour with every bite.
The congee is good enough, but only worth ordering if you really, really don’t want to cook it yourself, since a homemade version costs pennies and takes pretty minimal effort. Do not, under any circumstances, fall for the beef congee, which adds a few measly scraps of meat as your reward for a £6 surcharge.
Much better is the beef brisket and daikon soup, though this is only available from noon on, ruling it out for breakfast. This is in the light and delicate — borderline bland — family of Chinese soups, but it feels restorative. More to the point, the gelatinous chunks of soft beef are irresistible, and the softened daikon a perfect accompaniment.
I hate moaning about pricing, especially in our newly inflated economy where we’re probably all under-paying for everything we eat out and order in. I don’t know anything about Lilimi’s margins, or where they make their money. But if you’re going to cut into those margins by sending my food in a silly little bag for the ‘gram, then I think you’ve opened yourself up to the criticism.
Fortunately, what comes inside that bag is good enough to overcome most doubts, but unless it finds a way to charge a little less, Lilimi will forever remain an occasional splurge — and some time hangover cure — rather than entering my regular rotation.