Roasties, Cardiff: Chinese restaurant review

On November 23, 2024 by The Plate Licked Clean

Roasties’ recent opening on Macintosh Place has been keenly anticipated. Chinese roast meat plates aren’t new to the area but they are clearly the headliners here.

The original plan, I’m told, was to have them displayed in the window. But space is limited, so you’ll have to make do for them standing to attention on the rack behind the counter. (Bonus points for on-tap drinking water, too, and toothpicks.)

It’s a crowd pleasing succession of dishes: there are salt and chilli king prawns lightly battered, crisp and tangy and punchy with fresh red chillies (seeds and all), and steamer basket baozi, doughy and soft and stuffed with red braised pork.

Little siu mai steamed dumplings of pork and prawns are delicately made and done quite beautifully, sweetly meaty. Char siu ribs (marked as having limited availability) are not simmered in the fall off the bone takeaway style, but roasted so they carry more body and chew with that subtle sweetness.

To the right of a sizeable kitchen, and well over a metre tall, stand the silver bulk of the imported Chinese roasting ovens. With capacity for 12 ducks at a time, and with each one set up for different meats, they are the engine of the place.

It would be far easier to invest in a Rational oven I’m sure, but I think tradition is a key factor here. The combination of painstaking preparation, circulating heat and careful tending, with each oven set up for the different roasts, is where the skill is, to cook in a traditional roadside style rather than set a timer on a combi oven.

That will be the draw for many, I think, though there are regional dishes on the menu from the owners’ Hakka heritage: pieces of pork belly, braised in a thick sauce and draped with slippery ‘black fungus’ (cloud ear mushroom) in all its glossy glory. Have it with rice to soak up that sweet/savoury-straddling sauce for comfort eating at its best, the meat fatty and rich and starting to slump into the sauce and making no apologies for it.

When I eventually get my hands on the full three roast rice (on my third visit) it’s rather good. The pork, with its thick layer of fat, is golden and taut-skinned, with the duck juicy and sliced finger-thick and the char siu pork aromatic and tender. It’s a substantial serving for £13.60 including rice, and exactly what the excitement over Roasties’ debut was centred on.

It would be easy to assume Roasties’ core audience will be University students, the long standing Chinese community and more recent arrivals from Hong Kong. But they clearly have their eye on a broader appeal. That was always the intention, including a busy invitation evening (to which I went) for your friendly neighbourhood social media types; and while the subsequent coverage has clearly helped spread the word, that has come with a price.

By chance, my second visit coincides with owner Siu composing a Facebook response to recent customer expectations.

Compliments to the Roasties team for their graciousness.

Which is a very tactful way of saying:

Dear white people, please stop getting restaurants wrong.

I feel for them. You can only wonder how galling it must be to present your home traditions to a wider audience, only to face complaints grounded in ignorance and entitlement. To say, ‘This is how we do things, and you are welcome here’, and to be met with ‘That’s not how I like it, so do it my way.’ After all, the menu here is hardly heavy with the unfamiliar offal you might find at Cardiff Restaurant.

The customer isn’t always right. Restaurants do not exist to indulge your every whim- it’s why they have printed menus, rather than suggestion boxes- and it is perfectly fine to say, I can see what you’re doing here, but it’s not for me, and to move on to something you’re more comfortable with.

It’s a fair bet that anyone brought up in a non-British tradition will be familiar with cloth-eared preconceptions of the food they hold dear, ranging from the well-meaning but misinformed, to the insultingly reductive. (I’m not sure my eyes have recovered from all the rolling they did at the ‘Tapas is basically Girl Dinner!’ guff. And don’t get me started on the ‘Amazing produce!’ that is essentially supermarket fodder on its home turf). There’s a lot of sitting on hands involved, I’m sure: and after all, we are all learning. An open mind and a willingness to know more are what matters, and those are the opposite of entitlement.

But in a restaurant, you’re on their turf. This is not an extension of your home, or Burger King, where you can have it your way. However much you think you are mummy’s very special little soldier.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that Roasties hasn’t struck the devil’s bargain with the delivery apps, whose rapacious methods stick in the craw. It’s about a restaurant doing things its own way, being confident enough to serve its food on its own terms, and- hopefully- customers being respectful of that.

Let’s hope, eh.

6 MacKintosh Pl, Cardiff CF24 4RQ

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