I met May Chow for the first time nine years ago. In August 2017, I was invited as a writer to travel to Neufelden, a small village in Upper Austria, for what remains the most legendary Gelinaz! event of them all. Twenty-four of the most exciting chefs in the world, among them René Redzepi, Mauro Colagreco, Virgilio Martinez, Ana Roš and David Chang, gathered at Mühltalhof, the restaurant of Helmut and Philip Rachinger, who handed over three of their own dishes so that the chefs, working in teams of three and four, could take them apart and rebuild them for 140 guests. May Chow, the chef patron of Little Bao in Hong Kong and that year’s Asia’s World’s 50 Best Female Chef, was there as well, cooking venison with David Chang, Lukas Mraz and Colombe Saint-Pierre. It was a thrilling week of collaborations, but as such, as exciting as it was, it gave me no chance to taste the food May serves in Hong Kong. It took nine years, and a lunch in London, for me to have this chance, and it was worth every one of them.
London
May and her wife have been thinking about spending more time in London with their one-year-old daughter, and a residency seemed to her the best way to get to know the city from the inside, through its kitchens and its tables. When she talks about London’s dining scene, she does not talk about prestige or rankings but about people: the fact that so many of the world’s cuisines are cooked here with boldness and creativity, and that Londoners are curious enough to want them. She admires chefs who bring their own heritage into the room with real confidence, and names Impala and Ikoyi as examples, while Nieves Barragán Mohacho at Sabor is, in her words, her “North Star”. Whenever she is in town, she also eats Middle Eastern food, because it is a quality she cannot easily find in Hong Kong, and her favourite London moment so far was a Sunday lunch at Ishbilia, a Lebanese restaurant full of families, several generations sharing the same tables. “That’s the London I love,” she says.
The residency itself came together through Tribe and Gather, an events and talent agency that brought in The Peninsula, Cathay Pacific and the Hong Kong Tourism Board. May already works closely with all three in Hong Kong, so the trust was in place long before the menu was. The setting suits the story: The Peninsula was founded in Hong Kong in 1928, and Canton Blue takes its design from the Keying, a Chinese junk that sailed from Hong Kong to London in the 1840s.
A small room and a very large kitchen
Little Blue Noodle Bar seats 25, exactly the size of May’s first Little Bao, and that intimacy is what drew her to it. A small room allows a short menu that shows what she does, and it gives her time to go to the tables herself, which matters to her because so many of her guests are eating her food for the first time. Behind the room, however, sits the kitchen of Canton Blue, the hotel’s Cantonese restaurant, where she cooks alongside wok masters, dim sum masters and pastry chefs, and where she was surprised to find how many of the team come from Hong Kong.
What travelled and what did not
May cooks in London what she cooks in Hong Kong. She told me she did not change a single recipe for her London residency, and the flavours on the plate are the ones she created at home. The produce, on the other hand, is largely British: Tamworth pork, Highland beef, salt marsh lamb, diver scallops from Scotland and wild day-boat cuttlefish, which her kitchen grinds fresh every day, the closest thing to a change and, in her words, a happy one. She insists she is still only at the tip of the iceberg with British produce, and still learning, above all with the seafood. She was delighted to discover that Canton Blue already stocked an artisanal soy sauce from Hong Kong, and says the quality of Chinese dry goods in London has come a long way.
Two things refused to cooperate. The first was mei kwei lu chiew, the rose wine in which she cures her char siu and which gives it its unmistakably Hong Kong taste; after searching every shop in Chinatown and everything she could find online, she gave up and imported it from Hong Kong. The second was fresh noodles of the quality she wanted, which she has not yet found here and which forced her to rethink her mushroom noodles.
Lunch
May invited me to lunch as her guest, together with my daughter Laura, and we let her choose the food for us. She generously sent out seven dishes, which turned out to be a great deal of food for two people, and a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.
The raw scallop arrived first and was, for me, one of the dishes of the day. Scottish scallops, cucumber, jicama and red onion sit in a juice of coriander, white soy and green Sichuan pepper oil, a raw reworking of suan cai yu, the Sichuan sour vegetable fish. The whole dish bursts with freshness, the kind of plate you would crave even at the height of summer, and the Sichuan pepper is used with glorious generosity. The scallops had a beautiful texture, and when they were gone, I picked up my spoon and finished every last drop of the juice.
The lamb tartare, another of my favourites, is a dish that, by the rules of Chinese cooking, should not exist, since raw lamb is not part of the tradition. “Most of my ideas start with comfort food,” May told me, and this one starts with the Cantonese braised lamb stew, keeping its companions, the salted pickled mustard greens and the fuyu, the fermented bean curd the lamb is usually dipped in, while giving up the braise. In her words, the tartare “keeps the flavour memory but changes the form, and lets the lamb speak as purely as possible.” The salt marsh lamb tenderloin is creamy and remarkably complex, and the wonton crisps served alongside are so light that they seem to melt the moment you bite into them.
The delicious pan-fried dumplings are filled with short rib braised for five hours in soy, Shaoxing wine, ginger and garlic, then pulled apart, with the braising juices worked back into the filling, so that every bite through the crisp, golden crust releases the whole stew, sharpened by the black vinegar served alongside.
The lazi fried chicken comes from Sichuan, where it is a beer snack of bone-in chicken fried until dry and buried in chillies, but May cooks it the Cantonese way, frying it lightly so the meat stays juicy and tossing it with dried chillies, garlic, ginger and Sichuan peppercorn. It was crisp and juicy, with that tingling numbness I adore, and it was easily another of my favourites. I would happily have eaten the chillies as well, had May not stopped me: they are there to perfume the oil, not to be eaten.
The emperor stir-fry is the kind of dish you find in Hong Kong’s wok houses, a joyful tumble of courgette, garlic chives, pickled turnip, hazelnuts, dried tofu, squid and fried sakura shrimp, in which every mouthful brings a different texture and a different flavour. It is a dish I could eat every day without ever growing tired of it.
The prawn peanut noodles were the only dish I did not enjoy so much. May describes them as something close to a seafood dan dan: wheat noodles in a rich prawn stock worked together with house stone-ground peanut butter, but for me the noodles were too soft and the sauce too sweet, with the shellfish and the peanut pushing in the same direction until it all became just too much. Diners who like their noodles softer and their sauces on the sweeter side may well love this one.
The char siu brought this delicious lunch to a close. Tamworth pork collar is cured with sugar, salt, red yeast rice, black fermented bean and that imported rose wine, then roasted to order and taken off at medium, charred at the edges and still pink inside. It comes with handmade bao filled with pickled turnip, because May wanted the dish to feel like a celebration, almost like a Peking duck ceremony, and folded into a bun with the onion and mustard; it was superb.
The scallop, the tartare, the chicken and the stir-fry are the four dishes I would go back for tomorrow, and the dumplings and the char siu were super delicious as well; the noodles were the only dish I would not order again.
What May wants London to understand
“Hong Kong is a story of migrants,” May says, a city shaped by Chiu Chow, Hakka, Shanghainese and Cantonese cooks, with Cantonese cooking at its core. Hong Kong people are intense eaters, and that is why the detail in Cantonese cooking there is so good: “It’s not just ingredients, flavour and texture, it’s attention to detail.” The detail she chases above all is wok hei, the char that comes only from stir-frying very hard, which means stir-fried noodles that are slightly charred and dry and never greasy, and fried rice in which every grain feels separate. Her char siu is roasted to order for the same reason, because the char is the point.
She speaks with deep respect for the Chinese restaurants London already has, many of them built by families over generations, and she is not trying to replace any of them. What she wanted to bring was one more kind of room: a neighbourhood place with good music and real energy, where the flavour, the detail and the execution still run through everything, from the dim sum to the wok to the roasting. She also counts herself lucky that in Hong Kong she is free to be creative with Chinese food, and that freedom is felt on every plate at Little Blue.
The day after our lunch, my daughter and I were both already craving May’s food, so we may well be back before she leaves. If you love Cantonese cooking, or simply want to taste what one of Asia’s most exciting chefs does when she cooks as herself, go while you still can: the residency ends on the 1st of November.
Little Blue Noodle Bar, The Peninsula London, entrance on Grosvenor Crescent, until 1 November 2026. What we ate: raw scallop £23, lamb tartare £14, pan-fried dumplings £18, lazi fried chicken £17, emperor stir-fry £16, prawn peanut noodles £22, pork char siu £16. A discretionary 15% service charge is added.
We were there as May Chow’s guests. Gelinaz! culinary happenings are curated by Andrea Petrini.
Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based PR agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.