This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
At the Palazzo Madama museum in Turin, a docent robot is currently guiding visitors around the collections of the Savoy royal family. Known as R1, the machine glides over the parquet at a stately one mile per hour, responding adaptively to questions about furniture, tapestries and the history of the dynasty which provided the first king of a united Italy.
R1 is impressively cultured, but not as whizzy as Lightning, the robot which recently beat the human world record for the half-marathon by several minutes in Beijing. Lightning’s colleague Ace has been trouncing world-champion table tennis players, even inventing a backspin shot that Olympic player Kinjiro Nakamura considered impossible for humans to replicate.
Meanwhile, a little robot named Choppy trundles humbly between the booths of a subterranean restaurant off Leicester Square, efficiently stacking used crockery and wiping tables, its days enlivened only by an occasional croak of “Happy Birthday” when the fortune cookies appear.
There’s a dignity to the pathos of its lot: not for Choppy the admiring glances of the cognoscenti as it discourses on the miniature technique of the Master of Modena, nor the roar of the crowds as it powers across the finish line — they also serve who only stand and wait.
But what will happen when Choppy decides that perhaps there’s more to life? This isn’t a pitch for a Disney animation, but something about the plucky droid who labours at Chop Chop restaurant at the Hippodrome Casino tugged at my heart.
Casinos frighten me. Not their temptations, the urge to chance the rent, nor the ever-present whiff of violence discernible under the pinchbeck glamour, but the exposure. That this, the perpetual twilight punctuated by the croupiers’ bored exhortations, is what we are. Casinos aren’t soulless — that’s the trouble; it’s that they show us our miserable, craven, vacant souls. Choppy changed my mind.
Chop Chop was opened in 2023 by the Four Seasons group in nearby Gerrard Street, and you come here for the duck. Four Seasons ducks are the Lightnings of the anserine world, bred at Silver Hill Farm in County Monaghan, where they apparently drink pure spring water and listen to chamber music in their leisure hours (that’s not an invention).
Silver Hill duck boasts the tautest, most burnished skin, the tenderest, most aromatic meat that Cantonese chefs can aspire to, and something about eating it in a windowless room which you have to show ID to enter makes it even more delectable.
Deirdre had a bit of a kerfuffle with the security search, as she was fresh from Stansted after a cross-country ski race in northern Sweden and was wearing all her gear to save on the Ryanair luggage fees. The bouncer let her salopettes past, but she had to check the ski poles.
Chop Chop feels like a secret; it could be anywhere or more importantly nowhere and, once we’d penetrated the blank-eyed force field of the gaming floor, curiously serene.
The space is sparse and smartly contemporary, Scandi-ish mid-century wooden chairs, green floor and walls picked out with pale gold, buttery pleather benches in the booths. Menus are fairly brief, divided by the style of dish as well as courses. Thus salt and pepper comes four ways — prawns, green beans, squid or tofu, and lobster five, if Lady Luck has bestowed her favours.
We chose scallops with glass noodles to begin, alongside pork and Chinese cabbage dumplings, with an order of Kai Lan broccoli with tofu and black bean for health. The flavours were as brisk and precise as Choppy’s service; nothing unfamiliar yet pleasingly fresh and precisely delineated.
Chop Chop’s celebrated roast meats — soya chicken, crispy pork belly and Char Siu barbecue pork along with the duck — can be ordered singly or as tasting plates, but our eyes were on the Silver Hills.
Chubby slices of pale meat with their stripe of gleaming, enamelled skin come unadorned, with a smear of soy sauce and plain rice, sovereign, entirely assured.
The fragrance rises in the mouth, layers of anise first, then the sweetness of cinnamon, warm clove and pungent Sichuan pepper, annealed with garlic and ginger, as subtle, complex and satisfying as an old wine, which was just as well what with Deirdre having come over so sportlich.
Skiing 30 kilometres in minus 15 degrees wearing a stupid rucksack doesn’t automatically give you the right to make someone feel like a lush for their measly glass of house white. But the duck needed nothing, really, coasting gently across the palate, subtle and elusive yet satisfyingly robust.
More than worth crossing the Seventh Circle for, as was the pudding we chose from another short list: Pandan and Coconut Jelly Ice Cream Lolly, lurid green without, the sweet hay, nutty vanilla aroma of pandan blending with the sweetness of the wibbly, smooth coconut, a cold lick of innocence in this den of wanton spendthrifts.
By the time we were sucking the last goo from our sticks we had invented an entire back story for Choppy, which bustled round to gather the debris in a manner considerably less intrusive than human hovering. Chop Chop is not designed as a place to linger; it’s a pitstop from the tables rather than an event, but we were sad to leave it. The restaurant, too.
Chop Chop, Hippodrome, Cranbourn Street, London, WC2H 7JH
