‘Yi-Ban in London’s Docklands is a shrine to dim sum’

Photographs by Sophia Evans

But I am giving two friends the gift of Yi-Ban today, so I am thrilled to be here. This is the kind of place Yi-Ban is: a few weeks ago, on a curiously low weather pressure Bank Holiday Monday, my friend Michael took me to the restaurant for dim sum, and we sat at a huge low circular table and watched planes land through wind at City Airport opposite, and my brain dinged with all the people I was excited to pass the restaurant on to, like it had just been given to me.

The daytime dim sum menu is solidly good, but it’s the delightful peculiarity of the dining room that slapped such a huge smile on my face. It has the chilling anonymity of the conference room you all get summoned into when half of your company is about to get fired, and a panoramic view of a London that doesn’t feel like London at all, and you sit there and make a tower of steamer baskets and eat as many pork and crab dumplings as your body can handle, and leave truly content. I had to bring Ash and Jake here.

It’s fun to bring two separate friends together, especially when they have a shared interest in something, and that thing repels the interest of their respective girlfriends. Ash and Jake both like planes. One of them is literally a pilot. The other has the most complex YouTube algorithm of anyone I know. We met outside the only pre-1980s building in the entire area – an oddly beautiful red-brick Grade II-listed Victorian-era pub, the Fox Connaught, surrounded by blankly new three-star hotels called, for instance, Moxy – and had jolly pre-dinner drinks punctuated by astounded silence from both of them every time a plane took off nearby.

“That’s an Embraer,” Ash would say, and Jake would go, “I know, yeah. What’s the livery on that one?” A pause while we gazed at the sky, white on blue. “KLM.” We all had an app on our phone that confirmed this.

By day (apart from Thursday, when it is closed), Yi-Ban is a shrine to dim sum: you get a pencil and a little dusty-pink menu and you tick off dishes like you’re ordering at Argos. This is where you get the more interesting cheung fun and the fried turnip pastes and the wine-marinated chicken claws, and the restaurant buzzes with multigenerational families celebrating someone’s, anyone’s, birthday as an excuse to feast.

That Bank Holiday, after dutifully queueing and as a pot of jasmine tea bloomed between us, we left no dumpling unturned: pork and crab and prawn with chives and crystal prawn (“Most dishes contain Prawn & Pork,” the menu threatens) came out plump and misted perfectly with steam and wobbled monetarily on my chopsticks before being engulfed in that soy sauce and vinegar dipping sauce that should be easy to make at home but just isn’t.

The buns are tearably excellent, too: barbecue pork, fragrant and perfumed and mud-red and generously portioned. I hate digging around in a bun for the filling, something I forget every time I buy supermarket doughnuts. Waiters shuttle around in black T-shirts and predict your drink orders and ask quickly at the end if you’d like some custard buns for dessert and, if not, there is a queue so please finish up your tea and go. I was too full by then, so vowed to come back.

By night – this time I made a tactical 8pm sunset booking to watch the planes land in the most idyllic setting possible – the menu and the crowd changes, with young couples eating sticky-good sweet and sour chicken, and satay skewers, alongside oddly mixed work groups alongside girls glammed up to go somewhere (to go where? We’re in Docklands). Alongside us, three men who were judging how well each plane landed (“Look at the flare on that E190…”) and who were all convinced that we somehow needed an entire fried rice each.

Yi-Ban’s evening main menu is familiar Anglo-Chinese restaurant fare, an inch or two better than your average “It’s your Dad’s birthday and we’re taking him to the only restaurant in town he likes” spot but playing some similar notes: the roasted half-duck, shredded dramatically by our table, could have fed about 50 of us, and did three things that most of the roast ducks I’ve had in my life have failed at: it was succulent throughout, it had shaken hands with enough star anise to actually be aromatic, and it came with an endless pile of elastic pancakes.

I took some of those pancakes and wrapped them around the crispy shredded beef, which was another “Oh, it can be as good as this?” moment: perfectly sweet-crispy, leaning into its takeaway orangeness.

There were some lows. The portions of rice arrived late at the table as great dry mounds, and the Cantonese beef fillet hid under a slop of gelatinous brown sauce. Thankfully, a plate of roast pork belly, wobbly beneath and crème brûlée-glassy, won us back round. A private jet came in low over a bridge beside us and we all took guesses on where it came from.

Dazed and outside, a light breeze blowing, the final plane landing on to the runway nearby, I stared around Docklands in wonder. There are abandoned multibillion-pound follies and unsellable newbuilds with banners fluttering yellow on top. There are whole hotels without any lights on upstairs and somehow two different light-railway stops serving the same Excel centre. I genuinely couldn’t figure out how to get home without yanking an Uber there from two postcodes over. This is undoubtedly the strangest place in London. But somehow, home to two of my favourite meals of the year.

Yi-Ban, Regatta Centre, 1010 Dockside Road, London E16 2QT (0207 473 6699; yi-ban.co.uk). Dim sum from £5.50; Noodle dishes from £15; Custard buns £6.80; Wines by the glass from £8