Yesterday was a busy day, recovering from a hangover from what was meant to be “a quick drink” with friends from work, funny how quick drinks end up being an entire evening of drinking cocktails by the pint. Had my back and neck cracked by my chiropractor, leaving me in a state of bliss, had a guitar lesson, and got a bit of shopping in as well.

By the time 8pm rolled around, we were looking for somewhere in town to have something to eat, and Soho was mostly off limits unless you wanted to be blasted by gay anthems from what was left of the London Gay Pride celebrations.

Gerrard Street seemed to be one of the only places not absolutely crowded in London, so we went from restaurant to restaurant admiring the almost identical and unappealing menus, until we stumbled onto Macclesfield Street and discovered Leong’s Legend, which had some really interesting food scattered over the tables and a queue to get in.

We spent about 15 minutes both in the queue and at the table scanning the menu and trying to work out what to get, and it wasn’t easy, there are a lot of really interesting sounding dishes, some of which I wasn’t feeling brave enough to try.

Eventually we settled on:

• Vegetarian Spicy Soup
• Chicken Hot & Sour Spicy Soup
• Leong’s Long Bao
• Taiwan Mini Pork Kebab
• Belly Pork
• Beef with Garlic Slices

I have to say, the food smells and tastes amazing, but if you’re one who judges food with your eyes then you might struggle, for example the belly pork came in a hot pot in a thick gravy, and was absolutely full of fat, but cooking it like that meant that the belly pork tasted absolutely amazing after a bit of manual spoonage and struggling to remove the fat.

The beef was a bit disappointing until we discovered that the random bowl of black stuff was actually the dressing, which was mirin and something else and made the beef absolutely sing… shame we hadn’t noticed the dressing earlier.

The soups were a thick broth and very tasty, but overall we found them a bit overwhelming, neither of us managed to get further than half way into our soups.

I’d never had Long Bao before, or even knew what they were, so probably didn’t eat them properly. Having had a sneaky peek on Google I’ve discovered that the are soup dumplings, so I shouldn’t have been quite so shocked at the liquid coming out of the dumplings! They were very tasty though, even if they did remind me of stuffing.

There is a lot more on the menu that I’d love to try, next time I think it’d probably be more sensible to go in a larger group so that a lot of dishes can be sampled without anything being left to waste.