That sinking feeling | 7 January 2016

The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little Venice to the Guardian to Limehouse, and in which they quite often find corpses in shopping trolleys and vice versa. I do not know if the restaurant moves, and could theoretically travel to Paddington. I hope it does. The Regent’s Canal is an ugly stretch of water, which reeks of sexual violence and cheap alcohol and cyclists, and it is desolate; place it near London Zoo and you have a peculiar cognitive dissonance that could only happen in London: a tapir near a canal featuring a floating Chinese restaurant. It is apparently Paul McCartney’s favourite Chinese restaurant, which I found insane until I thought about it.

Its marketing tic is this: it is a Chinese restaurant on a boat. It could be a falafel restaurant on a milk float, or a sushi restaurant in a cement mixer, or a hotdog and champagne restaurant in a Reliant Robin but it isn’t. It serves Chinese food and it floats!

The boat is two storeys high, with a peaked roof, like a tiny piece of the Forbidden City, and very red: drag-queen red. It is lit up like a minute Las Vegas or the aftermath of a collision between a Honda Civic and an Audi S1 Sportback on the M3. It looks like the musical box in Camberwick Green; that is, it seems magical, but since Camden, its parish, looks like a Victorian sex shop that has burned down and taken every teenage gay and resident goth — who came from Frome to be a goth, but died — with it, magic is easy to evoke. There is literally no competition, whatever Foxtons might tell you.