徐州地鍋 Xu Zhou Ground Pot Chinese Restaurant
A ring of flatbreads is stuck round the inside wall of the iron pot, above the braise, and left there while the whole thing simmers.2
Why go
Dì guō is the cooking of Xuzhou, in northern Jiangsu, and this is the only kitchen in Britain that Meng Lu could find doing it. He spent six years here cooking the pan-regional card every Chinese restaurant in the country runs, Sichuan and Cantonese and Hunan and Dongbei on one menu, and travelled the country on his days off looking for food from home. He never saw any. So he opened on 19 July 2023 with the menu of a single prefecture.2 The sequence is chicken fried off in the base, breads pressed round the wall, then a low simmer, and James Porteous confirmed in the Good Food Guide that they arrive on the plate the way they leave the pot, pleasantly leathery.
1 He makes those breads himself: he is at the market after eight, in the shop after nine, and mixing dough from after ten, for a half past eleven open.2 The buying is sorted by how long a thing lives. Sanzi, the fried noodle nests, are too fragile and too short-lived to travel any way but by air. Everything else comes in from Xuzhou too, the rice noodles, the preserved mustard greens, the dried beans and the dry seasonings, and Meng Lu's rule for which lane a thing takes is its shelf life: the short-lived goods fly and the long-lived goods go by sea.2 That is a twenty-seat room running two freight lanes out of one Chinese prefecture.3
Order this / avoid
- Order: 地锅鸡, the ground pot chicken. The restaurant takes its name from it and, at Chinese New Year 2024, more than eighty of the hundred-plus pots the kitchen sent out in a day were this one.2
- Order: whatever else is in a pot, because the chef's own line on the format is 万物皆可地锅, anything can be ground-potted. Around twenty variants run on the card, from ribs to chicken feet to sea bass to a vegetarian pot.2
- Order: something off the dry pot section alongside. Porteous rated that half of the menu too:
The rest of the menu packs a punch, with a great range of dry pot dishes, noodles and other potent Sichuan options.
1 Note the word he reaches for. The kitchen calls what it does Xuzhou, in northern Jiangsu; a British critic reads the same heat as Sichuan, which is the shorthand the whole country uses for Chinese food that comes hot.
What locals & experts say
- James Porteous, The Good Food Guide (February 2026), on the signature:
Named for the Jiangsu dì guō dishes championed by this cosy eatery, their signature dish is a rich meat stew, loaded with a spectacularly aromatic blend of Sichuan peppercorns, chilli and star anise and crowned with pleasantly leathery mian bing.
1 - Meng Lu, to Modern Express (March 2024), on why the restaurant exists at all:
在英国这边，经常能看到川菜、粤菜、东北菜，还有沙县小吃和兰州拉面，但从来没有见过徐州菜，觉得有点遗憾。
He can find Sichuan, Cantonese, Dongbei, Shaxian snacks and Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles all over Britain, and never once Xuzhou food, and he found that a shame.2 - He also says he changed the food to fit the room, which is the honest half of the story. Xuzhou cooking at home runs salty and heavily spiced, students and locals told him it was too much, and he pulled it back until the room would eat it.2
- On the block it sits on, Nick Kwek wrote in The Scotsman in February 2024 that
Newington is rapidly becoming Scotland's new Chinatown.
4 His piece does not name this restaurant. Two years later the Good Food Guide's guide to that same cluster does, alongside Imperial Palace, Taste of Home, Noodles Home and Wò Hǔ Chán Lóng.
Good to know
- Price: nobody has published one. Budget for a shared pot plus a couple of dishes.
- Hours: the only figures on record are from March 2024, an 11.30am open and a close around 9.30pm. Two years old, so treat them as a shape and not a schedule.
- Booking: nothing published, and with twenty-odd seats and no reservation system anyone has recorded, treat it as walk-in. The queue at peak has run over an hour, so go early or go late.
- Groups: the pot is a sharing dish and the room is not a sharing room. Four is comfortable, six is optimistic.
- Getting there: West Preston Street runs off South Clerk Street in Newington, about fifteen minutes' walk south of the Old Town and on the same spine as Memed and Kebab Mahal.
- Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 23 July 2024, FHRSID 1745605. That is twenty-four months old, so the rating says nothing recent about the premises either way. It is a pass, and it is old.5
- Spelling: the FSA files this business as one word, Xuzhou, where the saved pin and the signage split it. Search it both ways.5
Verdict
should-visit — Meng Lu spent six years cooking the pan-regional Chinese card every restaurant in Britain runs, went looking on his days off for food from Xuzhou, never found any, and opened a twenty-seat room in Newington cooking one prefecture. Di guo is the whole argument. Chicken fries off in the base of a shallow iron pot, a ring of flatbreads goes round the inside wall above the braise and stays there through the simmer. James Porteous confirmed in the Good Food Guide in February 2026 that it lands, a rich meat stew loaded with Sichuan peppercorns, chilli and star anise under pleasantly leathery mian bing, and he rated the dry pot half of the card too. The buying holds the cooking up. Sanzi are too fragile and too short-lived for anything but air freight, everything else ships in from Xuzhou with the lane set by shelf life, and running two freight lanes out of one Chinese prefecture for twenty seats is a decision nobody makes casually. That is the detour, and it is a format you cannot eat anywhere else in this country. It stops short of the top rung on three counts. Porteous wrote a capsule inside a cluster guide and no scored review exists, so the entire critical record on this kitchen is one paragraph. Nobody publishes a price, so the value read is an editorial guess about format and not a number anybody printed. And the chef says himself he pulled the salt and spice back until students and locals would eat it, so what arrives is Xuzhou cooking tuned for Edinburgh. Go early or go late, keep the table to four, and put a pot and a dry pot dish down together.