Shanghai Modern, London WC2: ‘Comfortingly reliable’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent

A decent Chinatown newcomer with a familiar menu featuring all the usual suspects, and a few surprises

Chinatown didn’t appear to be broken before the planners set out to fix it. Still, here we are, many years later, with the new Central Cross, a gleaming, 48,000 sq ft plaza just off Charing Cross Road.

Shanghai Modern is one of Central Cross’s first openings. It is yards from the former Dive Bar beneath the King’s Head pub, which at one stage was one of the West End’s most excellent subterranean hidey-holes. “Call the police, there’s a mad man around,” sang Neil Tennant, immortalising Gerrard Street’s melee: a glut of Cantonese, Sichuan and Hunan restaurants, plus a rolling cast of tipsy gays, Wag clubbers, glamour studio girls, OAP mahjong leagues and jobbing sari seamstresses.