Try Chopstix

Be honest now. You love this exam period. It’s the ultimate trump card, a super-charged get-out-of-anything free excuse accepted by everyone. Exercise? Can’t, exams. Important favours? Can’t, exams. Washing? Can’t, exams.

But the best guilty self-persuasion is a culinary one. Spending time cooking economically sensible, easy-to-prepare lunches at home? Can’t, exams. Eating out is the order of the day, and the South Kensington station area is the place to eat.

So how come everyone goes to Subway, when they could go to Chopstix?

You know, Chopstix? I would say “it’s the Chinese place near to Little Japan”, but can’t for two reasons: 1) I don’t want to blow their cover and start some Yakuza/Triad turf wars in the genteel heart of London. But more importantly because 2) I don’t actually know if it’s Chinese. Especially because 50% of the choice of dishes are called things like Thai Red Curry or Malaysian Chicken. And the internet reliably informs me that these are not actually boroughs of China but whole separate countries! Seriously, I’m not joking!

So I can only assume they call it Chopstix as a catch-all temptation for people from all Chopsticks-using countries. And of course for people like me who use chopsticks to imagine themselves as a kung-fu master/wandering samurai/impossibly trendy Japanese school-girl and so forth. A smart move, like calling a restaurant Forx to appeal to all those savages from outside the west who still eat without them. I say ‘the West’, but of course do not include Obese America in that as everyone knows they’ve evolved teeth between their fat rolls and now just plough food straight into their abdomen.

To be fair, I can’t talk. That is to say, I can’t talk because I’m eating, unlike those guys who chat happily whilst their fat rolls munch away.

…Did someone say Fat Rolls? Then they must be talking about Chopstix which has the fattest spring rolls allowed before they become Spring Logs. But tasty as they are, they’re just the side-show to the main courses.

Sure, they’re probably not Authentic Chinese Cuisine. They don’t have delicious dumplings from Guangdong, or delicate, crispy Peking duck. There is no Sichuan spice or the stretched ribbon noodles of the people of Uighur. There isn’t even any tea; green, bubble or otherwise.

There are however several vaguely eastern dishes packed with flavour. There are the soft potato-and-skin slices in the creamy vegetable curry, or the bright bell papers in the Malaysian. There’s succulent nuggets of meat if you get salt-and-pepper chicken or the bright orange gloopiness of its sweet and spicy sister. I especially appreciate the goblets filled to the brim with red-hot Lya-Jyao sauce, to sate those of us who treat a spice as a nutritional priority over protein and carbs and to sweeten the deal they have those awesome cardboard cartons to eat from, after they’ve been stuffed generously with grub.

But best of all? It’s spreading around London. Now Chopstix (and its identical siblings Wox and Noodle Box elsewhere) is my first point of call for a reliably tasty meal that you can order and start stuffing into your mouth within a minute. It’s not so much fast-food as instant-food but no less tasty for it.

Maybe though I’m too easily pleased, and am sullying Felix’s food pages by reviewing a cheap, unauthentic, over-flavoured eatery frequented by people like me with a bi-polar palette-gauge of delicious and sub-delicious. So I asked Nicole Ahmed, who is instead someone who describes eating Thai food as like walking into a garden of scents and fragrances.

And she likes Chopstix too.

Chopstix 28 Thurloe Street London SW7 2LT