Poon’s and the Softer Language of Chinese Identity in London

For decades, Chinese restaurants in Britain were expected to look a certain way. Red lacquer. Gold dragons. Lanterns glowing against mirrored walls. A kind of inherited visual shorthand for “Chinese” that often felt more connected to Britain’s nostalgic imagination of Chinese culture than to the realities of contemporary Chinese life itself.

Poon’s moves in an entirely different direction. Soft peach tones, warm lighting and an atmosphere that feels intimate rather than theatrical immediately set the restaurant apart from the louder visual language long associated with British-Chinese dining rooms. The effect is subtle but surprisingly emotional: calm, confident and quietly glamorous without ever needing to announce itself too loudly.

Having lived between Hong Kong and London since the late 1980s, I was struck by how instinctively familiar the atmosphere felt — not in a nostalgic Chinatown sense, but in the way contemporary Hong Kong often balances refinement, warmth and urban intimacy. Poon’s feels less interested in performing “Chinese identity” than simply inhabiting it naturally.

At its centre is Amy Poon, daughter of the late Bill Poon, whose original Covent Garden restaurant helped shape London’s understanding of Chinese dining for decades. Bill Poon’s restaurant became legendary not simply because of the food, but because it occupied a particular cultural moment in London — one where Chinese cuisine was still often treated as exotic rather than nuanced, regional or personal.

Amy Poon’s reinterpretation feels very different. Rather than attempting to recreate the past, Poon’s gently reframes it. There is heritage here, certainly, but also softness, humour and emotional intelligence. The restaurant understands something many contemporary hospitality spaces miss entirely: people remember how a room made them feel long after they remember what they ordered.

That emotional instinct extends directly into the interiors of Poon’s themselves.

“In keeping with the ethos behind the food, home-cooking, I want Poon’s to feel like a home, albeit a Grade I listed home,” Amy tells me. “I don’t like interiors which are too perfect, too designed. Rooms are like children, they need empty spaces to grow into, undefined areas to be adapted and claimed.”

It is an extraordinary way of describing a restaurant interior — and perhaps exactly why the space feels so unusually human.

The interiors, designed by interior designer and family friend Janet McGlennon, avoid the predictable visual language so often associated with Chinese restaurants in Britain. Instead, McGlennon has created something layered, personal and deeply residential in mood.

The 60-seat restaurant inside Somerset House’s New Wing feels closer to an elegant private drawing room or old library than a conventional dining room. Family antiques, books, decorative objects, side tables and even a grand piano from the Poon family’s own collection soften the space with lived history and personal memory.

Nothing feels over-styled or artificially staged.

“The restaurant is very personal and I think people can feel this,” Amy says. “The art is all our own, as are the vast majority of the books. Some were gifted by generous friends. The photos are real.”

Warm timber tones, diffuse lighting and peachy blush hues create a cocooning softness throughout the restaurant. Lighting flatters rather than spotlights. Banquettes encourage lingering conversations. There is none of the visual aggression increasingly common in contemporary hospitality design — no performative maximalism, no hard-edged trendiness, no interiors seemingly designed more for Instagram than human comfort.

Instead, Poon’s feels emotionally generous.

Amy Poon

Describing herself as “a product of two cultures, Chinese with some European accents or British with some Chinese sensibilities,” and the restaurant mirrors that hybridity beautifully.

“You might not even think it is Chinese at first,” she says, “but you might think a Chinese person lives here.”

That single sentence feels quietly radical within the history of British-Chinese hospitality design.

For decades, Chinese restaurants in Britain were often expected to visually perform Chinese identity through instantly recognisable symbols and motifs. Amy deliberately resisted that instinct.

“I desperately didn’t want the restaurant to be themed, for the look to be contrived or somewhat forced,” she explains. “Cadence and calm are important to me. I also wanted to avoid the clichéd aesthetic of dragons and phoenixes and the stereotypical colour palette of red, black and gold.”

Louise Hill Design

The visual identity behind the relaunch carries its own layered story. Louise Hill Design first connected with Amy while both were living in Singapore in 2017 after Amy discovered Louise’s work on Instagram. They shared mutual friends, overlapping design sensibilities and an interest in Chinese food culture shaped by years spent across Asia.

There were also unexpected London overlaps. Louise’s mother had long traded at Covent Garden’s Jubilee Market while Amy’s father’s original restaurant once stood nearby on King Street. I too have spent years living in Covent Garden, making the overlapping geography of the story feel strangely inevitable in retrospect.

Louise went on to design the original Poon’s logo and brand identity as Amy began exploring the possibility of relaunching her father’s name.

“We had toyed with the idea of doing some more typically funky Hong Kong-style interiors,” Louise later told me, “but I had always envisioned something for her that would be a level up.”

That instinct feels crucial to understanding why Poon’s resonates so strongly now. The restaurant avoids both nostalgic cliché and aggressively trend-driven minimalism. Instead, it occupies a softer, more emotionally intelligent middle ground.

Poon’s at Somerset House

Even the setting itself feels quietly significant. Situated within Somerset House, Poon’s occupies a cultural context that mirrors its own layered identity — historic yet contemporary, British yet international, formal yet creative.

Amy insists the decision itself was less strategic than instinctive.

“We were quite far down the road with another site when Somerset House got in touch,” she tells me. “I originally said no but they were persistent and persuasive and when I finally saw the space, I was smitten by the proportions and the light.”

Then she laughs.

“Operationally, it is a hugely challenging building and there is still a whiff of tax office in the corridors but it has beautiful bones and I could see and feel us in the space.”

That mixture of romance and realism seems central to the entire project.

Growing up inside one of London’s most famous Chinese restaurant dynasties could easily have become an overwhelming inheritance, but Amy speaks about it with remarkable nuance.

“Legacy, inheritance, pressure — these are all quite weighty words,” she says. “Restaurants for many were about survival.”

Food in the Poon household, she explains, was simultaneously comfort, exploration and emotional glue.

Food at Poon’s

“Like a cup of tea, there was not very much that couldn’t be made better by a dish of noodles or a bowl of soup.”

That emotional understanding of hospitality still shapes the restaurant now.

“I love gathering people and feeding them,” Amy says. “Hospitality as someone who has a restaurant can feel like a professional, commercial word. To be hospitable, however, to be generous, welcoming and warm is how I think of hospitality.”

Perhaps that is why Poon’s feels so resonant right now.

London’s relationship with Chinese food culture has shifted dramatically over the past decade. Diners increasingly seek not simply authenticity as performance, but personal histories, regional nuance and spaces that feel emotionally genuine. The old visual shorthand no longer feels sufficient.

Amy herself remains slightly sceptical of how deeply that understanding actually runs.

“Superficially, yes,” she says when I ask whether London’s understanding of Chinese food is changing. “But the understanding and experience of it, like many things, is shallow and informed by captions and sound bites.”

Then comes the line that perhaps quietly explains the entire restaurant.

“Food is a living, changing, evolving gift.”

Memories

Later, while discussing memory, Amy tells me a story about a supper club she once hosted around a kitchen counter for sixteen people.

One guest mentioned that soupy rice had been a childhood staple her grandmother used to make for her. Amy offered her an extra ladle from the pot.

“She brought a spoonful to her mouth, tasted the rice and soup and burst into tears,” Amy recalls softly. “I think this story answers the question better than I ever could.”

And perhaps it does.

Because ultimately Poon’s is not really about nostalgia at all.

It is about something far more difficult to create: emotional recognition.

A room that lowers its voice rather than raising it. A restaurant that understands identity does not always need to announce itself theatrically in order to feel deeply present. A space shaped not around performance, but around warmth, memory, cadence and belonging.

Somehow, in contemporary London, that softer language feels unexpectedly radical.

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Poon’s Website