The Real Wan, Glasgow, restaurant review — mind-blowing noodles

Times

5 hours ago

Scottish Press Awards food and drink writer of the year, 2023, 2024 and 2025
We go to restaurants to be cooked for, invariably by a stranger. A truth so self-evident as to be redundant, and yet this is what I find myself thinking as I capture, with my chopsticks, the first clump of — how does the Real Wan put it? — 'mind-blowing homemade geda chunky noodles served in a sizzling garlicky chilli sauce with chilli and garlic aubergine'.
They really are mind-blowing. Tingly with Sichuan pepper, garlicky enough to perfume tonight's sleep, as hot as you'd hope a dish that mentions chilli twice will be. And new to me. I've never come across geda noodles — a street snack from Shaanxi province in which the dough is kneaded into irregular knots — and hope to again, asap, because they're so good; lusciously thick, resulting in the singular gummy pleasure that comes from sinking your teeth into freshly made noodles. What a soothing and highly specific bowl of noodles. It tastes, in the way restaurant food so rarely tastes, like it's just been made by a home cook who really wants to feed her guests.
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Which is exactly what the Real Wan is: the passion project of the home cook turned restaurateur Lea Wu Hassan, who in 2020 — a frankly terrifying time to start up a business — decided to bring the southwestern Chinese food of her heritage to the people of Glasgow. Lucky Glasgow. The passion runs in both directions. The Real Wan, which recently reopened after a long, obstacle-ridden hiatus in a second, bigger location in Mount Florida, is fiercely loved by its fans, who are as varied as the local community making up this part of Scotland's most diverse city.
One of them is my dining companion, Candice. Unfortunately, for reasons I swear are not my fault, I arrive half an hour late, which means time is pressured (we have an hour before the table has to be turned over). So Candice has ordered us three small dishes, all of them flawless. Hand-shredded cucumbers with Guizhou-style marinade are fresh, vinegary and more gentle than other smacked cucumbers I've encountered. Tofu sheets are sliced into ribbons and turned about in a punchy garlic paste and Guiyang sauce of dried red chillies. And another first: dumplings made not from wheat but rice, skins translucent and silken, stuffed with slightly sweet sticky rice and umami-rich salted duck yolk. Candice says the Real Wan is the only restaurant in Scotland where she's seen them on the menu.
The space (which is BYOB) is snug, cheerful and heavily perfumed with the mouthwatering scent of garlic, chilli oil and Shaoxing wine sizzling against smoking, well-seasoned woks. I love the small touches — the paper lanterns, mismatched crockery and porcelain dumplings on which the chopsticks rest. Lea is in the kitchen with a micro-team of two. At no point does she come out: this is a head chef too involved with the fast work of cooking to be a combination of paferrying dishes to diners. Service is fast and friendly enough, but could be more engaged. At 7pm we're kicked off our table, which is fair enough considering the next (lucky) diners have arrived, but curtly handled nonetheless.
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There are 'big wans' (larger dishes for sharing), 'wee wans' (small plates), something you don't often see in Chinese restaurants, and Lea's legendary dumplings. Which are the best I've eaten in Scotland. Pan-fried dumplings stuffed with Sichuan pepper prawn come stuck to a crisp, lace-thin tempura pancake, pleasingly described as a skirt. No, I've never come across that before either. It's also unusual to see vegan fillings.
Pork ribs are cooked according to a recipe by Lea's aunt — coated in Chinese caramel and flash fried in black vinegar. Glossy, sweet, tangy, insanely good. Rice cakes with pickled veg, fiery dried red chillies and garlic are made with glutinous rice flour for that irresistible buoyant, bouncy chew, and are tubular-shaped. Again, unexpected! Candice says their cylindrical shape is closer to Korean rice cakes. How exciting to eat so many novel dishes, each one distinct, regionally specific and deeply personal to Lea and the stories she so generously shares through her exquisite plates of food.
Southwestern Chinese cuisine encompasses five regions — Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan and Xizang. Much of Lea's food seems to zero in on Guizhou — known for its spicy, sour and mouthwatering flavour profile. Also Sichuan — land of the floral, numbing peppercorn and home to such traditional (and now endlessly TikTokable) dishes as mapo tofu, dandan noodles and kung pao chicken, though none of these feature on Lea's menu.
Because the Real Wan is a restaurant unlike any other — the product of a single unique mind. In Edinburgh the comparison that comes closest to its harmonious home-from-home café vibe is Pomelo. A truer one is Ranjit's Kitchen, also located in Glasgow's multiracial southside. It, too, has an Asian (in this case Punjabi) female home cook at the helm, and young white hipsters serving out front. These restaurants are radical, inclusive spaces centring the historically unsung (and unpaid) wisdom of female home cooks of colour. They are reconfiguring the way people live and eat together in our cities, through the turning out of plate after plate of beautiful food cooked straight from the heart. The Real Wan, 10 Clincart Road, Glasgow G42 9DJ, instagram.com/therealwanglasgow
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