Have you ever had that feeling when someone knows you so well it makes you want to cry? 

When Miranda in “Sex and the City’” is mocked, (or so she thinks) by the woman at her favourite  Chinese who cackles down the line, ‘every night it’s the same!’ she feels judged and embarrassed.  Because when your local takeaway knows your routines and foibles better than some of your closest  friends, it’s surely time to get out more right? Well I’ve got no shame. Every Sunday for nigh-on seven  years, I’ve been ordering from the charmingly shabby Dim Sum restaurant opposite my house in  Peckham and the weekly ritual is as comforting to me as a hug from an old friend. So I may as well  tell you now, this isn’t going to be a typical restaurant review. It’s utterly biased, totally subjective and  based on my deeply personal and idiosyncratic relationship with the aptly named Lovely House. Over  the years there seems to have been a benevolent conspiracy in miscommunication- the woman who  runs it still thinks my name is Christie and I will continue to not know her name (and honestly, after all  we have been through, it’s far too late to ask). No matter. Lovely House and I need not unpick these  irrelevant missteps. We remain the best of friends.  

Everyone knows the best Chinese food is found in slightly dingy outposts, not the swanky West end  joints. AA Gill himself was famously scathing about upmarket chinese. The dumplings at Chai Wu,  Harrods were parcels ‘decorated with shards of gold leaf or caviar or truffle, denying their basic  utilitarian purpose and pleasure.’ There is nothing decorous about Lovely House. The website is  appallingly basic, a mess of Comic Sans and random pictures. You will struggle to find the phone  number. Look on Twitter, and words associated with it don’t exactly scream foodie mecca. It ‘looks  like a dive,’ said one. It’s ‘understated’ said another. Put bluntly, it’s ‘not very cool’ but it’s also  apparently ‘authentic’. And cheap. I’m the place’s biggest fan and even I’ll admit Lovely House isn’t  exactly ‘vibey’. But man, I love their dumplings. 

Despite the abundant options in Peckham’s burgeoning food scene, it was Lovely House that I first fell  in love with back in 2013. Being 26, weekends were heady. My housemates Emily, Lauren and I spent  them swinging the pendulum between drunk or prone on the sofa nursing the kind of hangovers that  become untenable in your thirties. Sunday evenings at that first rented terrace revolved around our  pick up. We were self professed addicts to the prawn and chive dumplings. The crispy spring rolls.  The soupy dumplings we could never remember the name of. Post yet another Saturday session, we  would always have a craving for its comforting saltiness. The lashings of soy sauce with their glorious  prawn toast- so greasy and crunchy- a winning combination that left you wiping your chin in glutinous  satisfaction. So, we decided, whatever debauchery had led us to make bad decisions the night before  at 4am, all it meant was that we deserved more dim sum than usual from Lovely House’s extensive  menu. On one occasion I went too far. Having come back from a long afternoon in the pub, I got my  portions and sizes confused and ordered 50 dumplings. ’Is this for one?’ the woman asked tentatively  when I bowled in to pick up my gargantuan order. It was a fair question. I muttered something about  ‘some friends’ and then had to blearily pay for an almost industrious amount that took me about a  week to eat. 

The smiling woman at our favourite establishment has seen me through these turbulent twenties with  reassuring regularity, quietly observing my behaviour over the years. Commenting to Emily recently,  she asked, ‘How Is Christie? A while back she seem a bit crazy? But she more happy now, now she  much more settled.’ Her brief and sage analyses of my psyche often unnervingly hit the spot. Because  things have changed. I now have a mortgage, a house of my own and a fulfilling job. Brunches with  babies are more frequent than all nighters. But the Sunday night routine remains the same. And if  anyone tries to suggest an alternative culinary option for that evening, Emily and I will dutifully explain  to the interloper that in this house, since the beginning of time we have had dumplings and to veto this  would be, well, sacrilege. 

When you think of the average Londoners’ spending habits, much has been said about the tech  behemoths taking our hard earned cash. Ten quid for Netflix. God knows how much on Uber and  Deliveroo. But for me, Lovely House tops the single most consistent outgoing. We’re talking North of  50 quid a month. For seven years. This is no exaggeration. To this day, Lovely House isn’t on  Deliveroo. Hell, it doesn’t even do delivery. You have to go and pick up your order. Imagine! How  quaint. It is a place where your order isn’t anonymised and your interactions are remembered. Where  you aren’t ever judged for turning up in your pajamas on a Sunday evening and a pair of trainers,  having been nominated by the household for the dim sum dash. And every time it’s one of my  housemates rather than me, she will ask ‘how is Christie? Did she send you?” Amongst my circle, my  relationship with the ‘dumpling place’ has become folklore. At Lovely House my loyalty isn’t just noted,  it’s revered. One friend visited and was told first hand, ‘Christie? She’s our favourite customer! We  want to get her picture on the wall!’ The proprietor recently announced she had a present for me- a  silk scarf from China. It began to dawn on me that I was as much a part of her life as she was mine.  And what of the food over this half decade? Like Emily and I, still the closest of friends, it hasn’t  changed. We dutifully pull out the menu each week but we know it’s for show. Prawn and chive, pork  sui mai, one Shanghai and one Peking (whichever is which), spring rolls and copious amounts of soy  sauce that we mix with extra chilli and sesame oil. Fortune cookies and prawn crackers are always  added without us having to ask (we like to think these flourishes are reserved for regulars). My Lovely  House fix has been more constant than boyfriends, housemates and jobs. Since lockdown, it has  been shut and I feel bereft. So when someone asks me ‘oh you’re so lucky having all those delicious  restaurants on your doorstep. What’s your favourite?’ I will silently be thinking of the gorgeous Lovely  House, with its stark interior, its basic dim sum and charming owner before recommending some other  more well known and ambient choice. Because I know that most people just won’t ‘get’ Lovely House.  They will be too short sighted and too tuned into the zeitgeist to give into its understated allure and  that’s fine by me.