What with one thing or another we don’t get to explore the area around Victoria very often but we’d heard rumblings of a very well-regarded dim sum restaurant in the ‘hood. So when we got news that that self-same restaurant was opening a bar we thought it was time for a trip. Forbidden City, underneath the heavingly popular A Wong restaurant has a neat concept; it pairs Chinese snacks with wines, beers or cocktails. On first sight it’s just how we like a bar, pleasingly dark, busy and elegant. The furnishings are bespoke, from China, and the whole atmosphere is of the kind of place you could hunker down in for a long, long evening. Which is lucky because there’s some pretty spectacular food ‘n’ drink to get through. Neat twists on dim sum – prawns in lime foam, say, or foie-gras sticky sesame dumplings are teamed up with similarly innovative drinks (we loved a cocktail of Chinese port, cherry juice and egg white) and the whole shebang is just the kind of stay-all-night joint that we’d love in our neighbourhood too.

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