It has been almost a year since I discovered Leong’s Legend perched on the edge of China Town and got my first introduction to Taiwanese food, I had a bit of a bad experience with what I believe was called Oyster Congee that ended with both my friend Chris and I being violently sick not long after we made it home from the restaurant.

In retrospect, it was a bloody stupid idea to order something so rotten sounding anyway, but that’s the price you pay for being adventurous with food, even if you do get to try some absolutely amazing dishes, every now and then there will be one that teaches you a lesson.

Usually when I have a bad experience at a restaurant I won’t go back, and technically I’ve stuck to that rule… by going to their sister restaurant, Leong’s Legend Continues which opened last year on Macclesfield Street.

This time we avoided the Oyster Congee, in fact to be safe we avoided all Congee, sticking to the nicer things we’d had last time and a couple of other choices from the dim sum menu. Also excluded from the list were the pearl teas, I know lot’s of people love them, however I simply cannot be doing with squishy black pearls at the bottom of an ice cold stale tea.

What we did have though, was absolutely lovely and we polished it off in somewhat record time, which turned our rather frumpy waitress into quite a happy waitress (though who can tell if that’s because we liked the food, or because “those darn English are leaving”…)

The braised pork belly is to die for at Leong’s Legend, you can get it in a broth, or as we did you can have it with sticky rice, I don’t have the balls to eat the fat (though my colleague Olive swears it’s the tastiest bit) but it’s still really full of flavour.

Shredded turnip parcels are addictive, they don’t sound like they should be, but it wasn’t long after the plate arrived that we were staring at crumbs and asking if we could have more.

Schezuan style wontons packed a punch, not for the faint hearted but I love the flavour you get from the roasted chilli in the chilli dressing, coupled with the charred onion and garlic.

The Siu Long Bao still baffle me, large nipple shaped dumplings that have pork in and a tasty lemon grass and ginger broth, I’ve seen people eat them in different ways, squeezing the broth out onto a spoon for example, but we just ate them whole. Messy but tasty.

So all in all, maybe it is worth giving restaurants a second chance, one item on the menu might be your worst enemy, but what’s it going to do if you eat all of it’s buddies?