10 September 2025

Dining at Big John’s favourite Chinese restaurant

Am I on the frontier of successful multicultural Britain?

To say the food at the Blue Orchid in Romford, in far east London, is bad would be crediting it with an ambition it does not possess. Good is not the aspiration. Sweet, addictive, unhealthy – that is the formula of this run-of-the-mill Cantonese restaurant, sitting on the side of a multi-lane roundabout and in view of (what one can only assume) is the world’s largest Matalan. It is a Wednesday evening, the first monsoon of the season, and I am sitting there alone, staring down a chicken ball that is daring me to eat it. I continue to resist.

There must be tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants like this across the country, all offering the same version of anglicised E-numbered gloopy comfort food, bearing the same voluminous menus of chicken chow mein and “special” (?) fried rice and beef in black bean sauce and about 154 other items. But there is a reason I am in such proximity to the North Circular on a school night. Because the Blue Orchid may just lay claim to being the most famous among every such iteration: a tall MSG’d poppy in a field of prawn crackers and lazy susans.

The restaurant owes its prominence to Big John: a Romford-native cheese-monger and hugely overweight man, father to professional boxer John Fisher (posters of whom loom out of Orchid’s upstairs windows), aficionado of the Chinese takeaway, social media sensation (61,000 followers on X, 665,000 on Instagram, 455,000 on TikTok), and Great Britain’s inescapable id.

Romford is known for producing sportsmen: Frank Lampard, Tony Adams, Ray Parlour; the former snooker world champion Steve “interesting” Davis hails from this radial town in the Greater London area, too. I suppose John is his own kind of athlete, but in place of Parlour’s cosmic speed and agile right foot, he orders enormous takeaways from Blue Orchid with Petronian gluttony and the on-camera flair of a Fifties Hollywood ingenue. Ronaldo’s “Siuuuuu” catchphrase is traded in for Big John’s equally triumphant “Bosh!” In one recent video his order came, by my own calculation, to £118.30.

And so, off to the Blue Orchid to try to understand John’s inexplicable empire and to put some egg rice on the New Statesman’s expense account. The restaurant is nice, bathed in that typical artificial blue light, the staff are solicitous, the clientele friendly and ravenous. I can understand why someone of Big John’s takeaway erudition likes it here. I like it here!

At some point, just after the mid-20th century, Britain experienced a wave of migration from China, and an attendant Cantonese restaurant boom. But the immigrant Chinese cooks needed to adapt their dishes to meet British tastes. They looked to the Occident – or more specifically, to the British-Irish archipelago – and concluded that the north-western European palate must not be a particularly sophisticated place at all. Some of the greatest innovations in the British-Chinese kitchen were fuelled by a guiding question: what if we fried that? And, in the same way that Domino’s resembles something closer to a savoury cake than an Italianate pizza, this is the food of Southern China reconfigured to taste like an English school pudding.

I ordered shredded crispy beef (deep fried, in a sticky sweet sauce) and chicken balls (deep fried, with a sticky sweet sauce). It all tasted the same, and immediately bad for me. If I believed in a prohibitionist state then I would have to argue that this crucible of sugar, salt and oil should be illegal – people like it, and it is killing them. But I do not. And my initial reaction (please stop frying stuff!) quietens to something more generous (am I on the frontier of successful multicultural Britain?).

Big John – who preaches likeable ideas about hard work, loving your family and resisting the sharper edges of English nationalism – speaks for majoritarian Britain over sugary chicken. And so, on my foray to a roundabout in Romford I find inchoate tastes, England doused in sweet and sour sauce – diners in search of comfort masquerading as intrepidity.

[See also: My night dancing with Nigel Farage]