HK in London: The Poon Secret to a Perfect Wonton

Amy Poon was 15 when she made wontons for the first time. Over a month-long school holiday, she worked with an aunt at one of her family’s many restaurants and folded thousands of wontons, filling the thin, square-shaped skins with prawns and meatballs before sealing the dumplings with neat creases. Three decades later, when Poon started making wontons again, “It was like muscle memory,” she says.

Poon is the driving force behind Wontoneria, a three-month pop-up that is running until May in the bustling London neighbourhood of Fitzrovia. On a Saturday in March, a long line has formed outside the restaurant of customers patiently waiting in the rain for a bowl of steaming wontons drenched in a specially-developed vinegar dressing and topped with a sprinkling of green garnishes. Wontoneria is the latest venture of Poon’s, which first emerged as an air-dried meat brand before evolving into a series of reputed Chinese restaurants that were a significant part of the British culinary landscape in the 1980s. These days, Poon has returned to the legacy left behind by her family, and is setting out to revive the Poon’s brand through a line of sauces and pop-ups. 

Food has always been at the centre of Poon’s family. Both her father and grandmother were chefs, and the Poons ran seven Chinese restaurants in London and Geneva from the 1970s to the 2000s. This included Poon’s of Covent Garden, which was awarded one Michelin Star in 1980. At home, “I was always my mother’s sous chef,” says Poon. “Like most Chinese children, I had to chop the vegetables, wash the vegetables, clean up after – I was always there. So I started out at a very young age.” 

Poon’s paternal ancestors were from Shunde, Guangdong (also known by its Cantonese name, Shun Tak), and moved to Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the mid-1960s, Poon’s father, Bill, moved to England in pursuit of her mother, Cecilia. The pair settled in London, where they began using an old family recipe to make air-dried meats such as lap cheong (laap6 coeng2 臘腸) and lap yuk (laap6 juk6 臘肉). But Bill had greater culinary ambitions in mind. “The typical story is that my father came here and said, ‘My god, what is this chop suey stuff,’ you know, really quite disappointed,” says Poon. “So in 1973, he and my mother opened a restaurant in Lisle Street, on the edge of Chinatown, and it kind of took off.”

When the family set up a second restaurant in Covent Garden, Bill built a glass kitchen in the middle of the restaurant to counter stereotypes of bad hygiene that were still attached to Chinese eateries at the time. “It was a bit of a sensation,” says Poon. The restaurant was said to have attracted celebrity patrons, and it was recommended by a New York Times theatre critic in 1982. 

Poon’s parents eventually retired in 2006. After a childhood of running around in the family’s boisterous restaurants, she says she swore to herself she would never follow in their footsteps. She had studied Japanese at Oxford University, then worked in the contemporary art industry, opened a champagne bar, ran an event company, and finally, worked in luxury recruitment. But she was miserable in her career. “I hated it,” she says. “A friend saw me and said, ‘What are you doing? The only time you’re happy is when you’re cooking, eating – when you’re feeding people.” 

So she decided to take the step she swore she never would: she opened a restaurant. To be more specific, it was a pop-up in Clerkenwell that ran for three months in 2018. Former customers of Poon’s flocked from all over the country to reunite and share warm memories at the revived restaurant. But there were also customers who were less than happy with the experience, and thought the revival was nothing like the restaurant they remembered. Poon took it in stride; she had expected some pushback. “We’re not trying to recreate the menu of yesteryear. You can’t really compete with nostalgia and memory,” she says. 

That initial foray into the restaurant world also received mixed reviews from Poon’s parents. “My father thought my first pop up was terrible. With reason, you know?” He had operated on a different level of culinary mastery. When he visited the restaurant, he picked up two pieces of onion, and pointed out that one was fatter, while the other was two millimetres shorter. “I think I’ve never understood, or I underestimated, what my parents built, and what that meant,” says Poon. “To cook for somebody is so much effort. You think about that person, think about what they like to eat, you go to the market, you choose your produce, you buy it, you bring it home, you wash it, you prep it, you chop it, you marinate it – and then you cook, and that takes time.” 

At the conclusion of the pop-up, Poon began mapping out a grand concept of an all-in-one Chinese diner-deli-grocer-bistro. She had already paid a visit to a soy sauce manufacturer in Taiwan, who showed her how the sauce was produced – a salty, caramel-like liquid extracted from a yellow bean, pressed just once and fermented naturally in an ironware-cast. She soon found herself fixated on wontons. “The name Wontoneria just came to me in the middle of the night,” she said. In early 2020, she met with a potential investor, but there were already whispers about an impending pandemic, and the project was shelved. A year later, another partner, British chef Stevie Parle, reached out to Poon, and at his prompting, she launched a wonton pop-up and delivery business, making five thousand wontons over one lunar new year weekend. 

When Amy visits Hong Kong, she has wonton noodles back to back at Mak Man Kee and Mak’s Noodles in Jordan. The Mak name is synonymous with wontons in Hong Kong: they refer to the chain of shops opened by various descendants of Mak Woon-chi, who ran a wonton noodle shop called Chee Kee in Guangzhou and was said to have served Chiang Kai-shek. Although wontons had already been brought to Hong Kong by Guangzhou immigrants in the 1920s and 30s, the Maks are often credited with popularising the dish in Hong Kong, after the family moved to the city and set up a street stall in Jordan in 1945. 

Today, soft, slippery wontons can be found in most noodle shops across Hong Kong, usually containing fillings of prawn or a mixture of prawn and pork. On the Hong Kong Wonton Noodles Group on Facebook, there are daily posts comparing the wonton noodles of different shops across the city: the quality of the clear broth (often made from dried flounder and pork bone), the noodles’ egginess and level of alkaline, the thickness of the skin and size of the wontons, and whether the wontons are wrapped to perfection, meaning that the plain wheat wonton skin should, when cooked, resemble a goldfish tail.

With Wontoneria, Poon is going back to basics, drawing on her love for the bowls of wonton noodles she has had over the years. The meat is hand chopped to break down the proteins, which makes for sticky, springy meatballs, standing in contrast to store-bought minced meat, which is mushed up, giving no structure. Wontoneria offers four types of filling, including classic wontons containing prawn and pork, and a vegetarian option of jackfruit, tofu, cabbage, carrot, wood ear mushroom and water chestnut. Occasionally, there are limited edition fillings, based on seasonal ingredients, in accordance with the Chinese culinary tradition of eating what is in harvest. Wontoneria does not make their own wonton skin or noodles, but sources them from a favoured supplier after a series of trials. 

Though the Poon family’s restaurants were among a handful known for serving traditional Cantonese cuisine, they didn’t reflect the overall British public’s palate, which is still oriented around dishes like egg fried rice and sweet and sour pork. Marketing Wontoneria is a delicate balancing exercise in bringing in traditional symbols recognisable to the diaspora — red-capped vinegar bottles, seals with Chinese characters — while establishing reference points that appeal to less adventurous eaters. The name Wontoneria is a riff on “pizzeria,” and the cooking instructions on the dumpling delivery box states to cook them “as you would tortellini.” Wontoneria’s logo, a piece of fluffy cloud held between a pair of chopsticks, plays on the etymology of wontons, which in Cantonese means to swallow a cloud (wan4 tan1 雲吞).

With the food, however, no compromises are made. The pop-up’s wonton noodles look just like a bowl one could find in Hong Kong, with no forced attempts at fusion or “elevation” to make it more palatable to foreign tastes. Poon admits to being ambivalent towards the pervasive trend of “elevating” ethnic cuisines, which inherently implies that what came before was somehow inferior. “In a culinary journey, everything has its place,” she says. “It’s because of what came before them [that something] can happen next. There has to be so much respect and consideration of the past.”

As she built Wontoneria, Poon also began developing a set of four sauces under the Poon’s brand, including the WO sauce. The WO sauce is a spin on XO sauce, a spicy, umami Hong Kong condiment traditionally made with dried scallops, Jinhua ham, and chillies. Poon and her parents initially attempted recreating a version of the sauce, but was thwarted by import restrictions on dried scallops. “We tried drying our own scallops, but it was so cost prohibitive,” says Poon. They scrapped the idea and started over. For Poon, there was an integrity in the name of a food product; if they left out the scallops, they simply could not call this XO sauce. After replacing Jinhua ham with their family’s own air-dried meat, they bottled the fruits of their experimentation and renamed it the WO sauce. 

Wontoneria is still a family affair. Bill is now in his eighties, but still stops by the Fitzrovia pop-up to fold wontons in the morning, developing recipes alongside Poon as her reliable consultant. When the current pop-up comes to an end, she hopes to do more of them across the city, with the aim of eventually expanding Poon’s into a broadly food-centric brand. “I’m not going to find the cure for cancer and child trafficking,” she says. “But [for] a few hours, you know you can bring joy to people. That’s something quite special.”

Wontoneria is located at 23 Charlotte Street in London. For more information, visit wontoneria.com.