Xi Home Dumplings Bay, E1

Can I interest you in another regional Chinese restaurant?

In my Mandarin class this week, someone (not me, I swear!) voiced a rather specific fear: that China was simply too big to ever hope to try all its food in one lifetime. Taken literally, I’m afraid it’s probably true, but if you’re happy to limit yourself to just working through each of China’s provinces, then our teacher had reassuring advice: you can probably do just that without ever leaving the bounds of the M25.

That at least is one good reason to visit one of the three branches of Xi Home Dumplings Bay, which hails from Dalian in the north-eastern province of Liaoning. Neither city nor region is a household name over here, and while I’m not quite confident enough to claim that Xi Home is the only place in London serving food from Liaoning, I can otherwise only find a single spot in Bethnal Green that shut years ago. So if you’re ticking off your provinces, Xi Home may be required eating.

The Liverpool Street branch is the newest — following a stall in Colindale’s Bang Bang Oriental food hall and a sit-down spot in Covent Garden — and the brash, neon-rich décor is refreshingly modern. Most Western Chinese restaurants offer either old-school opulence or bare white tiles and plastic chairs, so I’ve got a lot of time for a place that instead decides to hang an enormous neon lobster from the ceiling and paint its walls with a dumpling-studded seascape. Its glitzy, colourful approach reminds me of the nearby Noodle & Beer, but both the food and furnishings at Xi Home are a cut above.

Assuming your regional Chinese geography is no better than mine, it may help to know that Dalian is a coastal city, situated about halfway between Beijing and Korea. That means that the dumplings are predominantly of the same northern style you’ll find at Beijing-based spots — thick, pasty white, and cooked until the dough puffs up — and that there’s a natural strength in seafood. The best dishes on the playful, newspaper-esque menu play to both strengths.

I was sceptical about shrimp and lobster dumplings at just over £20 for a portion — sounds like a great way to sell prawns at lobster prices — but begrudgingly admit they were the killer order. Presented playfully in green-skirted skins, these are at once rich and delicate, and it’s clear on first bite while there may be some prawn in here to make up the numbers, the larger crustacean is still the star of the show.

Almost as good are mackerel dumplings — or Northeast China Spanish Mackerel Fish Dumplings, to give them their full, if somewhat contradictory, name. These aren’t quite as fishy as you might fear from the presence of mackerel, but pack more interest than you’d get from the usual white fish, which can sometimes blend in with the dough to become nothing more than a bland vehicle for chilli oil and vinegar (no bad thing per se, but at another £20 per pop I’m glad these have a little more going for them).

Steer away from seafood and things get a little less expensive, albeit less exciting at the same time. A whole page of pork dumpling options hover around £12 a plate. We try two: pork and Chinese leaf are good if unmemorable; pork and fennel are… interesting. I find the fennel a little overwhelming, and struggle to shake the sense that this is a Western ingredient inserted awkwardly into a Chinese menu — despite the fact that this is not true at all, and the combination has its own history in northern China. It’s a testament to the weird weight of expectation: fennel doesn’t sit in the bucket of established Chinese flavours in my head, and so its presence here disorients a little. Or maybe they just put a little too much fennel in the mix and I’m overthinking things — it’s one or the other.

Despite having ‘dumplings’ in the name and ‘Dalian’ written into the logo, the menu actually extends pretty far behind both. There are giant soup dumplings from Jiangsu, roujiamou from Shaanxi, and a spread of Sichuan dishes. We branch out just a little to share a bowl of dan dan noodles, which arrive in a reassuringly cavernous bowl. I’ve had better dan dan — this clearly isn’t playing to the kitchen’s core strengths — but there’s not too much to complain about either. The pork is punchy, the sauce just the right side of spicy, the noodles have a little spring in their step.

There are a few cocktails on the menu too, alongside a couple of beers that are actually worth drinking, adding to the sense that this isn’t your grandma’s Chinese restaurant. A surprisingly large spread of vegetarian and vegan options don’t hurt either, though I reserve an eyebrow raise or two for the seasonal specials — there are a few luminous orange pumpkin options during our autumnal visit, and judging by their Instagram, right now they’re offering a custard bao with a surprisingly detailed likeness to Rudolph.

This is even one of the few London Chinese restaurants to offer a breakfast menu, which seems to straddle the line between East and West: traditional options like soy milk and deep-fried youtiao sit alongside what appears to be a flaky pancake with a fry-up stuffed inside. Don’t get me wrong, I’m intrigued, and will report back.

I have mixed feelings on the whole about Xi Home. Despite what seems to be an earnest enthusiasm to rep the cuisine of Dalian here on the other side of the world, the menu remains a little too sprawling, too nervous to cover all its bases and deliver all the dishes you tried at other regional Chinese restaurants, from other regions. But we don’t really need yet another mapo tofu or dan dan noodle, and a tighter focus on the stuff that Xi Home is really great at, the Dalian dishes that make it unique — the dumplings, the seafood — would only do it good.

If you’re willing to come in and order with a focus that the menu itself lacks, you’ll do well here. But if this is London’s only restaurant representing a whole city, a whole province, then I wish it would have the guts to own that a little more.