Banquet 88 sits at the wrong end of St Katharine Docks, flanked by a Zizzi and a Slug & Lettuce, which is either the worst possible location for a serious Chinese restaurant or a kind of culinary joke whose punchline is that the food is genuinely good. The room is functional, spare, 140 seats across two floors with a 50-person private dining room that currently has nobody to fill it — the Chinese embassy, which Beijing bought the Royal Mint site across the road for £255m, has yet to materialise as a neighbour. The restaurant seems to be waiting. The menu runs to 200-odd dishes and pulls from Cantonese, Sichuan, Shanghai, Teochew, Beijing, with a detour into Malaysia and Vietnam via satay chicken skewers and pork and prawn spring rolls. That breadth is either a liability or a statement of ambition depending on your priors. The dim sum list alone offers black sesame egg yolk custard buns, morel mushroom jade siu mai, chicken feet with taro in black bean sauce, and black truffle abalone siu mai. This is not a menu designed for the tourist groups fresh off the Tower of London. The vegetarian dumplings wrapped in dragonfruit skin arrive in a yellow-rimmed bamboo steamer on perforated paper — translucent, pink, almost biological, filled with cabbage, daikon, and herbs, served with a deep-red Sichuan chilli dip. They are earthy, gelatinous, and correct. The hot-and-sour sesame aubergine from the appetisers menu is sliced thin, battered in the lightest possible tempura coat, fried and smothered in sesame and heat with black and white sesame seeds and spring onion on top. Sweet, rich, fiery, moreish — the review writes itself because the dish earns it. The mapo tofu arrives gloriously red. A server checks before bringing it: 'It is hot.' He searches for a second word and settles on 'slimy,' warning that British diners don't like it. The person reviewing this restaurant disagrees. The tofu is soft and silky, the sauce numbing, the heat rolling rather than stabbing. The signature pickled radish — Rubicon-pink, Jenga-stacked, crunchy, heavily perfumed — is the kind of palate-reset condiment that earns its place on the table without being asked. Mango and pomelo sago closes the meal in a flower-shaped gold-rimmed glass: light, tropical, not trying too hard. The honest structural question about Banquet 88 is whether the ambition of the room and menu has found its audience yet. The reviewer turns up solo for lunch and is seated at a vast table overlooking the marina. The clientele is a mix of academic-looking Britons with Chinese partners and Tower of London tour groups. The 50-person private dining room sits empty. The restaurant is open Christmas Day. Banquet 88 is a serious Chinese kitchen installed in a location built for chain restaurants, running a 200-dish menu for a crowd that hasn't fully arrived yet. When it does, the cooking will be ready.
