Soy, sesame and rice vinegar: are you really using them properly?

Her family’s Chinese restaurants were legendary. Amy Poon reveals her culinary secrets

When Amy Poon opens her first permanent restaurant, Poon’s at Somerset House in London, next week, she won’t be behind the pass. “I’m not a chef, I’m not a restaurateur,” the 52-year-old says, laughing. “I’m not sure what I am. Which sounds like an existential crisis.”

She is a bit of a restaurant maverick who tried but couldn’t keep away from hospitality. She is Chinese culinary aristocracy — one of her ancestors, a great-grandfather, was chef to the emperor, and another great-grandfather invented the stock cube when travelling as a cook for a district governor. If the name sounds familiar, her father, Bill Poon, is the seventh-generation Chinese masterchef who migrated to London from Hong Kong in 1967 “in hot pursuit of my mother, Cecelia”, Amy says.

Her parents opened the Cantonese restaurant Poon’s in 1973, originally in Lisle Street in Chinatown, before opening their second restaurant a few years later in the then unfashionable Covent Garden Piazza. Poon’s attracted celebrity regulars such as Sean Connery, Barbra Streisand and Mick Jagger. In 1980 Bill was the first Chinese chef in the world to be awarded a Michelin star. Poon’s changed how Chinese food was perceived globally and they opened more restaurants — six in London and one in Geneva.

The Poons retired in 2004 and the restaurants closed with them, with Lisle Street being the last.

Amy wasn’t tempted to take over. But now, two decades on, she is opening the Somerset House restaurant, which is decorated with hand-painted murals inspired by the Mogao Caves in China and the Chinese zodiac. Why? “Look, I swore I would never go into hospitality,” she says. “I grew up in restaurants, I’ve seen the antisocial hours and how hard my parents worked.” Then, with a wide smile, she adds: “My mother thinks I’m bonkers.”

“My father just thinks, ‘I know you can cook, and I know you’ve got a good palate, [but] you’re not a chef, what are you doing?’ And then I get random phone calls: ‘Have you thought about this noodle dish?’ And I’ll go, ‘Yes, it’s impossible, 23 ingredients and 5,000 steps.’ But he came in the other day and I think he finally realised that we were serious — and even offered to come in to help cook.”

She resisted the restaurant path for a long time. After reading Japanese at Oxford she moved to Tokyo in 1994 and spent the next couple of years travelling back and forth between the two. “I did everything — I worked in advertising, corporate PR, and even taught Latin.”

In 2003, while living in Singapore, she tried her hand at hospitality: a short-lived champagne bar in the red-light district. “It didn’t last because Singapore was very bling.” But on the back of this venture came fresh inspiration. “My friend Alison sat me down and said, ‘The only time you’re happy is when you are thinking about what to cook, so I don’t know why you’re wasting your time not going into the family business.’

She was right, Amy says: “I love nothing more than having people together and feeding them. But also, I want to explain about Chinese, especially Cantonese, food.”

She continued travelling back to London from Singapore and in 2018 revived Poon’s for a three-month residency in Clerkenwell. “We were full every night.”

Having almost signed a lease for a dumpling restaurant just before lockdown in 2020, during the second lockdown the chef Stevie Parle called her to see if they could do something. “I said I don’t have a kitchen, I don’t have much cash, but I suddenly thought, let’s make wontons.”

Later, working together in the kitchen of his restaurant Joy, they launched a delivery service, Poon’s Wontoneria, in 2021. She even recruited her father to help them make the weekly 5,000 dumplings.

Poon’s Signature Sauces came about in 2022 and were soon landing in supermarkets and scooping up awards. The brand now has a permanent shop in Bermondsey, southeast London.

After a year’s residency at Carousel — an events space in Fitzrovia, London, which has a rotating list of guest chefs — it was finally time for a permanent restaurant.

What can diners expect? ‘‘The idea is that you come here to eat if you don’t have a nice Chinese friend to cook for you, it’s granny wisdom and mummy food,” she says, adding: “At the moment, you’ve got a lot of male chefs with muscles, tattoos and half a dead cow over their shoulder grilling on open flames and there’s nothing fine or subtle about that. This is like a woman’s way around things — not being aggressive with your ingredients but being very gentle.” To back up her commitment to bringing more female chefs to the forefront of the industry, in the open kitchen at Poon’s at least half the team are women — from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Some Poon’s classics such as clay pot rice will be on the menu and new dishes such as “The hill that Amy didn’t die on”. She explains: “Many Chinese dishes have rather poetic, nonsensical names with tenuous metaphorical associations.” In this case, an elaborate prawn toast with lardo.

Another classic is Lisle Street zha jiang noodles. “At my pop-up a woman pointed at her tall son at the other end of a large table saying she was having such bad cravings when she was pregnant with him, she sent her partner to Lisle Street ‘to get me takeaway’.” Although Poon’s 2.0 is a modern slant on a classic restaurant, the restaurant maverick concedes: “Nothing tastes as good as nostalgia.”

Six cooking tips from Amy Poon

How to choose the right soy sauce

People think that dark soy sauce has richer flavour, but in fact it just has more colouring agent; a light soy sauce has a more pronounced flavour. She says there isn’t any point using dark soy sauce — it’s a bit sweet and sticky, but doesn’t add anything more to your cooking. Amoy and Lee Kum Kee are good brands to use, but she really recommends spending a bit more in the same way you would with good olive oil.

She says the best Chinese soy sauce is kept in China, and that her own brand, Poon’s London Premium First Extract Soy Sauce, at £13 a bottle, is “completely worth it compared to cheaper supermarket bottles” — because, she argues, it’s made in Taiwan.

The right way to use it

Many of us add the soy sauce during or after cooking. She says the pro trick to cooking with it is to drizzle it around the inside edge of the wok, rather than straight into the food, “because it needs to have heat to release the aromatic flavour. In Cantonese cooking, the process is called ‘being bloomed’, which translates as needing to see fire, literally, because it releases the flavour. Dipping is one thing, but if you’re cooking with soy sauce, you want to have its full flavour, so it needs heat to bloom. If you are making a stir-fry, make a little gap in the pan with a spatula and add some soy sauce to release the aromatic flavour.”

In Chinese cooking, pair the right vinegar with the right dishes

She says: “A lot of exported Chinese vinegar is unstable; it’s a living thing and has to ferment and reach acidity, and sometimes it’s not consistent. I use Amoy rice vinegar regularly, which is consistent and easily available.

“Black vinegar is very pungent with a strong taste, and is the best for cooking with. My father has this great recipe for Ching Chiang pork vinegar ribs, which enhances such a meaty and fatty meat — it’s like matching pork with the best wine. You use it instead of soy sauce — in stir-fries, soups and sauces.”

She uses white rice vinegar for pickling cucumber and white radish. It doesn’t need to be a long process, she says. To a jar, add 250ml of white rice vinegar, about 200g of sugar, a bay leaf, three fat slices of ginger and a sour plum you can get in jars in Chinatown, she says, “which I give a smack to release the flavour”. Add the vegetables and leave it all overnight in a dark place. “The pickles keep in the fridge for about a month — but they don’t last long in my house.”

For red vinegar, which is more sour and therefore great for dipping sauces for dumplings or for marinades for meat, she uses malt vinegar instead. She uses it to make a delicious dish of steamed grey mullet, which works well for any white fish. “I make a dipping sauce with malt vinegar, garlic and a small amount of white pepper, which gives heat but [is] not sharp like a chilli, and sugar. Or just add some grated ginger to the malt vinegar and you’ve got a delicious dipping sauce for wontons or noodles.”