.CN ★★★★☆
228 City Road, Cardiff. 029 2048 6688
The name refers to the domain for Chinese websites, which is reasonably obvious when you see it written down. Spoken aloud, it sounds like it should be French, if anything: dottecienne. (Did you mean: diététicienne, Google asks.) The message could be that .cn is looking to cater to folks who regularly tangle with such URLs: people raised in China who are keen to eat food that actually resembles what is eaten there. When Buzz visits, on a post-payday Tuesday evening, everyone else in there is Chinese, and of student age. While this bears the aforementioned message out, the restaurant – open since January, and laid out with a minimalist, modern decor – is keen to impose itself on the domestic population of Cardiff.
It would be a small travesty if it didn’t, because not only is the menu largely unique in Cardiff, based on what Buzz eats it’s also terrific. Industrious in its intent to use the less celebrated parts of the animal, you can get dishes like pig ear, pork lungs, lamb offal soup and spicy duck tongue, if you’re so inclined. I’m banned from doing so by my vegetarian partner, who tolerated me eating a fish with its head on last month, so I go for braised pork in soy sauce as my main. It’s commendably fall-apart tender and just fatty enough. Tofu skin and green pepper is the chosen veggie dish: the former ingredient is sliced to look like tagliatelle and, the difficulty of sourcing it in the UK notwithstanding, as simple as it’s effective. (This also applies to my partner’s shredded potato and chilli starter.)
We share a serving of fried rice with cashew and pineapple, and I manage to eat a whole steamed bun. Moreover, I make my first acquaintance with pearl milk tea, a sweet drink with tapioca balls which you suck up through a straw. It’s a pretty incomparably tactile experience, and is only the tip of the iceberg as regards .cn’s efforts to extract Cardiff’s Chinese cuisine from MSG purgatory. NOEL GARDNER