Meet the Supper Club Redefining Sichuan Cuisine
Hua Yang’s Jiaonest blends migration experiences, childhood memories, traditional techniques, and community storytelling to bring life and dignity back into the capital’s Chinese food ecosystem.
Communal dining at Jiaonest. (Photo by Haihan Li)
Supper clubs are taking over London — the lingering echoes of the pandemic are shutting down dancefloors as the capital’s youth turns to communal dining in these homey, exclusive, pop-up eateries. The trend has opened up opportunities to young, amateur chefs who hope to experiment with community-building with food. Hua Yang’s Sichuan-inspired dining room in Stamford Hill, Jiaonest, is one of them.
On the surface, Jiaonest looks like an ordinary Chinese dinner table serving a 12-course menu with twists on traditional recipes, think braised pork belly with shiitake mushrooms, and herb-infused roast chicken. Unlike some of the most sought-after pop-up tables, Jiaonest doesn’t feature live poetry, speed dating, or any conceptual hook designed to fuel niche cultural capital appeal. But something about the narrative of Jiaonest makes it irresistibly authentic: before supper clubs took over, Yang grew up with it.
The 25-year-old curator and chef-patronne grew up in Chongqing, the Chinese megalopolis known for its complex topography and numbingly spicy hotpots. Her parents owned a small pharmaceutical business in the city. “There was a kitchen between the office and the warehouse, where a lady catered for everyone based on her daily finds at the market.” Yang spent much of her childhood as her sidekick, helping with grocery runs and announcing the day’s menu to her parents’ colleagues.
“I didn’t know how to cook, and I wasn’t even fond of what she made,” laughed Yang. “But I remember the thrill of delivering and sharing the food — it felt just like a supper club.”
It is even safe to say supper clubs are integral to the culture of the Chinese southwest, a vast region that includes Yang’s hometown Chongqing and the neighbouring Sichuan province, in the form of teahouses. They are all-accommodating spaces where strangers gather to play chess, smoke cigs, talk business, and gossip over a cuppa. But it took Yang a few gardening sessions to realise the resemblance, understandable when she’s 5000 miles away from home.
After graduating from Central Saint Martins with a master’s degree in narrative environment and without a job, she decided to volunteer at the ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) Community Centre in De Beauvoir. “I took on some mowing and gardening, but ultimately what touched me was how Hackney’s young creatives bonded with the elderly locals through food,” said Yang. “The sense of belonging prompted me to start what later became Jiaonest.”
Jiaonest is based in Yang’s apartment. Like any other Chinese dinner table, food at Jiaonest is served on large sharing plates, shared among eight guests surrounding the table. Marking a sharp contrast to the rise of small-plate bistros, Jiaonest has stayed true to its roots.
Besides reviving the communal aspect of Chinese dining, Jiaonest has another mission. In Mandarin, Jiao stands for chilli, a culinary pillar of the Chinese southwest. "Many Sichuanese restaurants in Europe take advantage of the chilli’s pungency to compensate for lower-quality ingredients,” said Yang. “That’s why it’s much easier to find upscale Cantonese restaurants in London.” Jiaonest is an attempt to fill this gap.
Yang hopes to author an elevated version of Sichuanese cuisine that explores the complexity and depths of the chilli. On the other hand, “people fail to realise that Sichuan also has flavourful, non-spicy dishes,” said Yang. One of her guests’ favourite is a time-consuming pork intestine broth with subtle, yet sophisticated hints of medicinal herbs.
“Ironically, Chongqing in recent years has also become a gentrified influencer hotspot where restaurants go after the internet-worthy shock factor of spice, instead of the gastronomy itself,” explained Yang. “Jiaonest brings back the pure and delicate flavours I remember.” The pork intestine broth, for example, is reminiscent of a road trip to a Chongqing suburb, the only place on the planet where that dish exists.
That’s where the storytelling comes in. Luckily, Yang has both the most authentic stories and a degree specialising in crafting narratives with space. Earlier this year, Yang took a step back to explore not the harvest nor the cookery but the space in between. Specifically, Yang was inspired by the century-old knowledge of how fresh produce could be preserved to last and be savoured until spring comes around.
“My family’s pharmacy also studied preservation, as we specialised in pairing medicinal herbs with seasonal produce,” said Yang, who worked with her parents to evoke the seasonality of Sichuanese cuisine through techniques like sugaring, smoking, brining, and curing. Some of the highlights include earthy dried bamboo shoots from the mountains of Chongqing and the umami-filled mei cai, or mustard greens, sundried by her flatmate’s family back in China.
While Yang put in the effort to source ingredients from China for her London dinner table, she doesn’t shy away from using local ones. In its earliest days, Jiaonest focused on authentic, classic Sichuan dishes. “It didn’t attract the right people, nor did it create the right atmosphere to spark the right chemistry,” reflected Yang. She quickly realised that those dishes weren’t representative of who she was. As an immigrant far away from home, he abandoned the original menu and drew inspiration from life in London. She weaved themes of migration and adaptation into her growingly inventive recipes. “Shying away from tradition unapologetically also keeps Sichuanese food purists from policing your food,” joked Yang. “I want to spark conversations and resonations more than just serving delicious food.”
“Recreating Sichuanese flavour profiles with things you find here is one of my favourite things to do.” Yang is not alone. A quick search on the Chinese social media app Rednote will take you to hundreds of trending posts sharing close equivalents of Chinese ingredients you can find in Sainsbury’s. “This is a collective immigrant experience that’s true to Jiaonest’s identity,” added Yang. Some of Yang’s favourite attempts were enhancing broths with dill and basil, and supplementing Chinese chillis with Mexican ones for a different aroma.
She describes Jiaonest as a testament to the fluidity of Sichuanese cuisine while maintaining its integrity. Essentially, Jiaonest brings the focus of supper clubs back onto the food. Yang’s narrative acts as a starting point for her guests to build on with their narratives. Needless to say, the storytelling of the food needs to be compelling enough to merit such connections.
In March, she hosted a Ye’er Ba-making workshop. Traditionally, the sticky rice cake with savoury fillings is wrapped in aromatic leaves and steamed until cooked through. But each guest brought an ingredient that reminds them of home to be added to the Ye’er Ba and shared with others. “I asked them to write down the stories behind these ingredients, resulting in a beautiful discussion of familial values and diasporic identities,” said Yang. “It’s fascinating how such a simple dish can foster such deep connections.”
Community-building has always been an important part of Yang’s creative practice. Before her apartment became Jiaonest, Yang curated screenings of Chinese documentaries and discussions in her living room. The event later became Ambiguity Film, a curation team dedicated to showcasing independent Chinese films marginalised by mainstream discourse. Although Ambiguity Film grew out of the living room, the community stayed to fuel the storytelling of Jiaonest.
Last week, Yang made a breakthrough by bringing Jiaonest into a commercial kitchen through a pop-up with Finsbury Park’s Ginger Natural Food. The stir-fry-focused weekend bistro furthers her experimentation of London’s seasonal ingredients through the vessel of Sichuanese techniques. This time, Yang “explores how the shifting climate of spring and summer influences our bodies and senses,” by flavouring accordingly.
Later this month, Jiaonest will welcome a new menu, in tune with the change of seasons. Yang will continue to put the boundaries of Sichuanese cuisine to the test. “This summer, we plan to bring Jiaonest into a recycling-focused community in the woods of Yorkshire with our first-ever fully vegan menu, so stay tuned.”
