Usera: Madrid's Chinatown

Madrid's Chinatown is not in the centre and it is not signposted. It is in Usera, a working-class district south of the Manzanares that almost no guidebook sends you to, and it is the largest concentration of the Chinese community in Spain. Roughly a quarter of Madrid's Chinese residents live here — around a tenth of the entire Madrid region's Chinese population in one district.

It does not look like San Francisco or London. There are no gates and no lantern-strung pedestrian streets. It looks like ordinary southern Madrid — 1950s blocks, wide pavements, old men outside bars — except that every third shopfront is a Chinese supermarket, herbalist, phone shop or restaurant, and the signage is in Mandarin with Spanish underneath.

Why the food is better than you expect

The thing that makes Usera worth the metro ride is a demographic detail. The majority of the Chinese community in Spain originates in Zhejiang province, on the coast south of Shanghai. That means the cooking here is not the Cantonese-derived template that became "Chinese food" across most of Europe. It is regional, and the regions are represented properly.

You will find Zhejiang cooking, serious Cantonese kitchens, Sichuan, Yunnan and Shanghai dishes, often in restaurants two doors apart. Wanzhou grilled fish — a Chongqing dish where a whole fish is grilled then brought to the table in a tray of bubbling, chilli-heavy broth to be eaten communally — has become one of the barrio's signatures and is the single most fun thing to order here with a group.

The street to aim for

Calle Nicolás Sánchez is the culinary spine. It is a short, unremarkable-looking street, and it has a concentration of restaurants that would be unremarkable in Shanghai and is extraordinary for Madrid.

A few names that have become fixtures:

• Royal Cantonés (Calle del Olvido 92) — widely argued to be the best Chinese restaurant in the city. Proper Cantonese, which means the menu runs well past the familiar: jellyfish, tendon, duck, lotus root, and dim sum.
• Hong Kong 70 (Calle de Nicolás Sánchez 11) — traditional Cantonese with Cantonese chefs and dim sum made daily.
• Lao Tou — an explicit homage to Zhejiang cooking, which is to say the food of where most of the neighbourhood's families actually come from.

Hours shift and places close and reopen under new names faster than any guide can track. Check before you travel across the city for one specific room.

How to order without missing the point

Two pieces of practical advice, both of which come from the same principle: the restaurants here are cooking for their own community first.

Ask for the other menu. Many places keep a Spanish-language menu of familiar dishes and a separate Chinese-language one that is longer and more interesting. Pointing at what the next table is eating works. So does asking, plainly, whether there is a different menu.

Go in a group. The format is shared plates on a round table, and a couple ordering two dishes will eat a fraction of what the kitchen can do. Four people is the minimum to make a place like Royal Cantonés make sense.

Lunch here runs earlier than Madrid's — Chinese restaurants often serve continuously through the afternoon rather than closing between the Spanish lunch and dinner services, which makes Usera a useful answer to the 17:00 hunger that catches out every visitor to this city.

Chinese New Year

Once a year the barrio stops being a quiet food destination and becomes the biggest street party in southern Madrid. The Chinese New Year parade runs through Usera in late January or February, depending on the lunar calendar — dragons, lion dances, costumes brought from China, lanterns made by local schoolchildren, live music. There is a fireworks display at Parque Pradolongo and a DJ set outside the district council building.

It is genuinely well attended by the rest of the city, which means crowds. Go early, eat before the parade rather than after, and expect the restaurants to be full.

Getting there

Metro Usera on line 6 puts you in the middle of it; Plaza Elíptica (lines 6 and 11) is the other useful entry point. From Sol it is about twenty minutes. The C5 cercanías line also serves the area.

There is nothing to "see" in the monument sense — no museum, no church on the postcard circuit. You are going for lunch, for a supermarket aisle of ingredients you cannot find north of the river, and for the reminder that Madrid is a city of three and a half million people rather than a set of squares between the Prado and the Palace.