Dining Out 032: Lovely House Dim Sum
Dinner in Peckham.
My hatred of the sloppy use of the phrase “neighbourhood restaurant” is reasonably well-documented. It’s a sort of buzzword I used to see in press releases constantly* (the very budget for which usually rules out genuine “neighbourhood restaurant” status), deployed to describe identikit small-plates-and-natural-wine places in Hackney and Islington, targeting people who work in marketing and literally nobody else. My gripe has basically just been that any place that calls itself a neighbourhood restaurant should probably at least try to appeal to the whole neighbourhood, rather than simply to the mores of people whose tastes are embroiled in a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario with hyperlocal London meme pages.
I bring this up, anyway, not just because I love moaning about it at literally any given opportunity, but because the restaurant I went to this week had all the trappings I look for in all of my favourite actual neighbourhood restaurants – homey ambience, mixed clientele, really affordable, flavoursome and unfussy food, decent portions and £4.50 glasses of wine. Enter: Lovely House Dim Sum in Peckham.
Lovely House is a small Cantonese restaurant on Bellenden Road in Peckham, pretty much next to one of the area’s superlative chippies, Cod Fellas**. It’s only small, maybe six or seven tables in the whole place. The food is well-done and it’s a good room to feel warmed up in on a cold Saturday night. I’d say as the winter starts to get a bit more unforgiving, this sort of place, with its sunny yellow walls and fortune cookies that come with the bill, will start to be exactly what I’m craving pretty much all the time.
The menu has a dedicated dim sum section, followed by starters, mains, noodle and rice dishes. We focussed on the dim sum because objectively, it is the most fun bit, emerging as it does from the kitchen in a tower of steamer baskets, which you then get to lift the lids off with great anticipation, like you’re looking in the boot of the car in Pulp Fiction. Our order was two squishy buns filled with hoisin duck, followed by three cute little sui mai dumplings, plus rice wrapped in a lotus leaf for good luck. We also picked the crispy beef based entirely based on the photo of it on the menu, plus prawn crackers (obvs), prawn toast (obvsier), and pak choi for health.
The duck buns were puffy, light, and eminently rippable in that way that is particularly satisfying when you’re really hungry, which I was. The duck inside was hot and chunky and the hoisin very sweet, which for my taste, was ideal, though others who were not raised on Haribo Starmix, Dairy Milk and McDonald’s caramel sundaes might disagree. The sui mai were adorable as sui mai always are – we chose a pork and prawn filling which for me is thee elite combo. You get all the softness and depth of minced pork, studded with the resistant texture of the prawn for a bit of intrigue. Balancing these two reasonably delicate flavours is a hard job, but I liked the Lovely House version a lot.
Lotus leaf rice is always absolutely amazing – I love the stickiness – and here, they cook it with Chinese sausage, chicken and pork. All of the components come together as one because of the way that the texture of the rice necessarily incorporates everything, meaning that every bite felt hearty. I could probably have eaten two more all on my own.
The crispy beef was bang on – coated in a shocking red sauce, crunchy, oily, served with onion and peppers, absolutely – though my favourite thing I ate all night was honestly probably that serving of pak choi, cooked simply with garlic. Shocked bright green, the leaves came to the table draped on top of each other like a group of girlies after bottomless brunch. They still had plenty of bite, but best of all was the smoky flavour from the masterful touch with which they’d hit the oil in the wok. Alongside the sweetness of the beef dish, it was dynamite.
For all of this, we paid £25 per head, including a drink each (my glass of wine was, emphatically, big enough to last me the whole meal and it cost, as mentioned, less than a fiver). We arrived at 7, when a couple of tables were already sitting down, and gradually the whole Lovely House room filled up. Music piped in and it sounded good layered with the noise of friends chatting about their lives, couples on dates, a pair of girls discussing the American election. On the counter next to me, there was a Halloween pumpkin with a face drawn on it rather than carved into it. It was fun in an undemanding way, and the food followed suit: familiar flavours executed in a way that still felt surprising, because of the deft hands in the kitchen. A neighbourhood restaurant, then: easy, really.
* Less so at this tail end of the year, in fairness – now it’s “canteen”.
** I really love Cod Fellas for the full chippy-tea-in-front-of-the-telly shebang but if you want to know about the best chips in Peckham you need to be heading directly to Yilmaz Kebab without passing Go. Pillowy in the middle with a thin but definite layer of crispness on the outside. Bloody hell. They even still taste good when you wake up hungover and eat them cold out of the carton next to your bed.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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