Pimlico’s two-Michelin-star Chinese restaurant A Wong reopened on October 10 after closing in August for a full refurbishment of its kitchen and dining room. The rebuild coincides with a reboot of chef-owner Andrew Wong’s signature Collections of China menu, which is typically made up of more than 30 dishes across multiple courses covering 4000 years of Chinese culinary history.
Wong took over the restaurant from his parents Annie and Albert Wong 15 years ago and renamed it in their honour. It won its first Michelin star in 2017 and a second in 2021.
Post-refurb, the kitchen is roomier and the dining room smaller, with covers down from 38 to about 32. “We’re not magicians,” Wong tells Broadsheet. “We can’t create space.” After years of patching up issues with the building, he wanted to do all the work needed to bring it back up to scratch in one go to offer a more comfortable environment for diners, and in recognition of longtime customers who have supported the restaurant over the years.
“We’d love to offer our guests some real luxury,” he says.
Guests now arrive at reception facing a glass panel that opens onto the kitchen, designed with Gareth Sefton of kitchen design firm SHW Design, a friend of Wong’s. Plate-glass windows give diners a view of the chefs in movement. Despite the new install, Wong says that the kitchen has no new equipment. “If anything, a lot of my cooking these days is going more basic,” he says. “A wok, a steamer and a nicer, evenly flat dim sum table.
“The primary objective of the renovation was to have a more ergonomic kitchen, so the team can navigate the space comfortably.”
Meanwhile, a new 12-seat private dining room sits to the right of the entrance, with additional restaurant seating along a curved banquette.
For the dining room’s design, Wong reunited with architect and design studio Michaelis Boyd (Duddell’s, Soho Farmhouse) who worked on his second restaurant Kym’s, which opened in Bloomberg Arcade in 2019 and closed in 2020. The designers have reimagined the interior with plush banquettes in twilight-blue velvet, art nouveau-inspired chairs in honey gold, dark walnut-stained oak floors and light jade Kit Kat tiles. A five-panel mural by French artist Claire Basler runs along one wall, a piece supported by the Lee Kum Kee family, longtime associates of Wong.
The new Collections of China menu draws on Wong’s research in Beijing and Shanghai, and on contemporary fine dining in China. “I’m trying to pull together a menu that represents what I see Chinese gastronomy to be right now, in 2026.”
To that end, dishes include a whole pickled chilli steamed turbot; “milk less” white fish broth; chilled sweet potato noodles with red sugar and jujube syrup; and a stuffed sea cucumber with prawns and Cantonese crispy pork skin that’s emblematic of the new menu’s approach to modern Chinese cuisine.
“In Hong Kong you get [stuffed sea cucumber] everywhere, but it’s important for us to do this dish because the ingredient is very expensive, which is unknown to most people in the West, so we need to explain why,” Wong says. “It’s stuffed with prawn paste and braised, and we serve it with a piece of crispy pork belly, just the skin. We change the sauce all the time, but the latest one was a pickled mustard green sauce, the kind you'd normally get with a hot pot fish dish.”
Wong says diners in China will pay far more for top produce than most British diners would, and that he wants the menu to recreate the feeling of those meals. The sea cucumber dish, he says, exemplifies the fundamentals of Chinese cuisine, and the coming together of multiple elements on a single plate.
Modernisation, he says, “doesn’t mean fusion; it just means movement.”
A Wong
70 Wilton Road, SW1V 1DE
Hours: Tue 5.30pm–10.30pm
Wed to Sat midday–2.30pm, 5.30pm–10.30pm
