Whatever the ins and outs of Westminster politics, Keir Starmer can take small comfort in the fact that there is one place where he is consistently popular. It just happens to be 5,000 miles away.
In and Out, an upmarket restaurant in Beijing, has been fully booked since Starmer and his team dined there in January during the first visit by a British prime minister to China since 2018.
His visit, pictures of which were widely shared on Chinese social media, has caused such a buzz that diners can now order from a specially printed “prime minister’s menu”, which lists the dishes that Starmer ordered. They include mint leaves wrapped in thinly sliced beef, grilled asparagus with porcini, pork ribs in plum sauce, sweet pineapple rice and deep-fried shards of goat milk cheese.
Starmer did not, however, sample the dish for which In and Out (Yi Zuo Yi Wang in Chinese) is most famous: the hallucinogenic mushrooms ordered by Janet Yellen, the then US treasury secretary, on her trip to Beijing in 2023.
In and Out specialises in food from Yunnan, a province in south-west China that borders Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Yunnan food is known for using a wide array of exotic fungi as well as the fragrant herbs that are indigenous to the province’s mountains.
Starmer passed on the mushrooms – known as lurid bolete – ordered by Yellen, and stuck to the humble porcini.
The vanilla mushroom order has not stopped his menu of choice going viral in China. The restaurant has been booked out since the visit and the specially printed menu immortalising Team Starmer’s order features a cartoon King’s Guard whose bearskin cap has been replaced by a mushroom.
Su Yajun and Sun Chen dined at In and Out on a trip to Beijing from neighbouring Hebei province after reading about Starmer’s visit on social media. “We heard the British prime minister came here to eat, so thought the food must be really good for him to choose this place,” Su said, on a busy Thursday lunchtime. “We wanted to have a taste of what they had.”
“We kept seeing the news on Douyin,” Sun added, referring to the Chinese sister app of TikTok.
One waiter at In and Out who was working the night Starmer visited said about half of the diners visiting the restaurant since then had been influenced by the UK prime minister.
“Customers would ask things like: ‘Did the British prime minister come here to dine a couple of days ago?’ and then ask: ‘What dishes did they eat? Can you introduce them to us?’ and things like that,” he said, adding that Starmer was “very friendly and approachable”.
It is not just In and Out that is dining out on the PM’s visit. More than 1,500 miles away from Beijing, in Yunnan, the Guardian columnist Martin Rowson spotted more restaurants serving prime minister menus.
Despite taking a battering in the post-Brexit years, Britain does retain a soft power appeal in many parts of the world, including China. It is not uncommon to meet football-mad taxi drivers who have never left China but who can tell you who has been up and who has been down in the Premier League over the past 30-plus years. The British actor Rosamund Pike has a surprisingly large fanbase in China. Starmer’s visit to the country was generally welcomed by the Chinese public, in contrast to the criticism that he faced in the UK for pursuing closer ties with Beijing.
Sun said she wanted to travel to the UK to visit the University of Cambridge, to encourage her child to study there.
Starmer’s visit to China was supposed to reset relations with Beijing. However, the goodwill earned on the trip may be laid to waste if he is forced out of office, or at least forced to neglect international affairs as his political fortunes at home crumble. Reality can be a bitter pill to swallow. Perhaps now he wishes he had some of those magic mushrooms.
Additional research by Lillian Yang