A fresh feel to Chinatown

The owners of the Chinatown restaurant AAURA may well be devotees of the Yellow Pages, where you find companies such as Aardvark Plumbing doing their best to get to the head of the list. Or maybe they discovered too late that there is already an Aura restaurant in St James's.

Whatever, any new, ambitious Chinese restaurant is to be welcomed, especially one where chefs and management are, to some extent, traceable. John Mann, who is behind the venture, also owns ECapital, where Aaura's executive chef, David Tam, successfully established its Shanghai-influenced menu.

General manager Kitty Lee will be a familiar face to past customers of Aroma II and Kitty's Aroma. A new name is Michael Ngai, an experienced chef who has recently arrived from Hong Kong.

The premises are huge - seating 500, over three floors - modern and unusual in the installation of a large bar near the entrance. The predilections of Westerners are catered for in other ways - and before I go any further, I must add that lovers of authentic Chinese food will be happier at lunchtime or until about 5pm.

In that part of the day, at the bottom of the long, interesting list of dim sum are delectable items such as suckling pig and jellyfish in two roasts; sliced pork's maw with black pepper; pork terrine Shanghaistyle; drunken chicken with herbs and wine; casserole of pork trotter, and five-spice sliced beef flank.

In the evening, a few similar items make it into the Regional Specials section of the main menu but tend to get obscured by the stirfries and sizzling dishes that predominate and lure with their easy, Day-glo appeal.

It was only after we were recognised by Kitty on the evening we visited Aaura that we discovered roasted wood pigeon was available. It turned out to be the star of our main courses.

For some reason, pigeon appears on a small, separate laminated menu of mostly chow mein and rice assemblies including several bathed in that
un-Chinese constituent, tomato sauce.

We started with impeccable slices of jellied pork knuckle accompanied by crunchy jellyfish, and stirfried scrambled egg white with seafood, where fancy presentation in a deepfried vegetable basket surrounded by a necklace of cucumber slices did nothing to take the mind off the traces of ocean sticks (once known as crabsticks) in the mixture.

King Crab Twin Style, where the roe is baked in the shell and the legs soused with a spicy hot sauce, was good in part, ie, the roe. The sauce was unsubtle and overpowering.