Twas the night before Christmas, and as my family are in no way religious (beyond our extreme devotion to food) and missing one core family member (my little brother is still in Beijing) we had a rather lowkey but still Christmas-y evening.
We visited our local cinema to see a taping of The Nutcracker performed by the New York City Ballet at the Lincoln Centre, a beautiful theatre I was fortunate enough to visit roughly this time last year to see Carmen. It was a little odd watching something I'm used to seeing live in the cinema, but it was a beautiful production and a very nice outing to get us feeling festive.
After our Christmas booster shot, we wandered across the road to Bambusa for tea. Both my parents had already been there and spoke very highly of it, so my expectations were relatively high.
The style of Bambusa's menu encourages sharing, so that's exactly what we did. To start with, we enjoyed the gow gee (vegetable dumplings) and peking style duck pancakes.
The dumplings were very pretty and equally as tasty. Having recently visited The Land of Dumplings I may be a little hard to please in this area, but they were certainly yummy. My only criticism would be they were served with forks, which struck me as odd, and as it turns out while I can wrangle chopsticks fairly competently if left with a fork I will complete bollocks up eating a dumpling.
Ducky pancakes! The pancakes were nice and thin, the duck nice and bbq-y and the vegetables fresh and crunchy. Pretty much all you can want from a ducky pancake, really.
After whetting our appetites with those little treats, we moved onto a teryaki lamb rack and fresh rock salt prawns with potato dumplings.
The lamb was ever-so tender, just delightful. The sweet sake and soy glaze was lovely and sticky, but certainly not over the top as glazes can be. The accompany broccolini, lotus root and mushrooms also benefited from the glaze and this plate was emptied fairly promptly.
Looking at this (very bad) photo makes me want more of these prawns. The prawns themselves were very fresh with lovely sweet, tight flesh. The batter was very light and although obviously fried, they were in no way greasy and seasoned with great precision. Perfect. The cute little potato dumplings were quite fun too. I guess it was a very fancy/abstracted version of fish and chips.
While the dessert menu was very tempting I had to decline and had a reasonable coffee instead.
All in all I was impressed the Bambusa and will definitely visit again. In addition to the great food on offer, the service was of a surprisingly high standard as well and I take my hat off to the young staff there, they did a wonderful job.



