Restaurant Spy

If you were to give me a choice I would not go to a Chinese Restaurant. I’m not entirely sure if it was my first experience, going to my “girlfriend” Barbara Muir’s birthday party as a ten year old at the Hong Kong in Dundee or not. I was a dead cert for the Chicken Maryland, but Barbara’s dad Jim insisted I try the sweet and sour pork. Sour? Where was the bloody sour? It was sweet, sweet, sweet, sticky, gooey, violent infra-red gloop surrounding a bit of pig. It was so horrible I didn’t eat anything remotely Chinese until I was in my twenties. Even then it was a backdoor through. I fell in love with Korean food – bitter Kim Chee and barbecued Bul Gogi - a heavenly combination with noodles and sticky rice. Korean through to Thai, Indonesian, subtle Vietnamese and finally to fiery Szechuan and ceremoniously dumped on the door of Cantonese.

Having recently eaten at China Red, I look forward to my next visit there. It was a family meal enjoyed by all.

Staff meet you on entering to seat you if you have booked a table. The layout of the tables is fairly spacious, so you are not nudging people with chairs whenever you leave your seat. The staff cannot do enough for you, they are very friendly and approachable.

The menu offers a variety of Thai, Chinese and Sichuan foods, amongst others. There is a vegetarian section, although it is not very large, all meals in this section were priced under £6. Other main meals on the menu cost between £5 and £10. There is a section on the back of the menu that provides set meals, allowing you to sample a bit of everything on the menu, maybe from the ‘Thai’ variety for example. This costs from £10 per person and usually caters for three people, although you can request that it caters for five, for example. In this instance, staff will ask you to choose another two meals from the main section of the menu, so there will be more choice and food brought out from the kitchen. You are never kept waiting for your meals. The time between ordering and eating is very short, and the time between first and second course for example, is little.

Had some fantastic cocktails and a delicious meal at the new Alisan chinese restaurant near the new Wembley stadium. On arrival the place is a little daunting and characterless due to it's size but it has a lively atmosphere (probably due to the 2 for 1 cocktails we had with the Dim Sum snacks!)

A good tip is to go for the set menus - it's saves a lot of reading of the extensive menu!! The veggies amongst us can highly recommend the veg set menu - a big thumbs up!

To MSG or not to MSG? That is the question. When we went to the New Revolution Chinese we wondered if Red Guard waiters would write our orders in Little Red Books under portraits of Chairman Mao and relay them to a factory field kitchen. But, no. This was not the revolution referred to. Theirs is a cooking revolution, balancing starch, fibre and protein where monosodium glutamate and other artificial additives are eschewed and the reliance is on natural flavours. They also favour the cooking of the harsher climes of North China where the emphasis is on wheat (noodles) rather than rice, though they do serve rice dishes. The place is of average size with plain white walls and minimum decoration. The wooden chairs look like they came in flat packs. I had hot and sour soup and found it neither hot nor sour enough. I don't know whether that was due to the absence of MSG or other artificial additives but whatever the reason I always hope hot and sour does what it says on the tin - and this didn't. My friend had a salad to start which she found bland and uninspiring. Mains were better - I had a quite fiery duck and noodle dish and her squid was good. However, it was the service side of things which let them down. Although they were very polite we did get the impression that they couldn't wait to see the back of their customers. When asked when they closed they said 11 - on the dot - all finish - and they couldn't wait to get finished dishes off the table even if other people were still eating. At twenty to eleven I asked for coffee and was told that the coffee machine had already been switched off. As eleven o'clock approached the atmosphere was more like a pub at kicking out time than a restaurant. No lingering over coffee here - even if the machine was still on. I won't be back. Harry

My family were up in London for a holiday last week and I had the happy task of finding somewhere for us to eat out. My Dad being something of an enthusiastic amateur Chinese cook had initially suggested a trip to Chinatown. However, is there any Londoner who doesn't find the whole area around Leicester Square immensely tawdry? Maybe it's just seeing the armies of council workers hosing away the encrusted filth deposited by the previous evening's revellers from the pavements every morning, or having to endure the rancid stench of the giant overflowing dustbins along narrow passageways like Lisle Street, but it's not somewhere I normally choose to hang out, never mind eat out. And anyway, doesn't anyone else find those gaudy, sticky-looking flat ducks swinging from hooks in the greasy windows of so many Chinatown restaurants pretty off-putting? Maybe I am ignorant of some arcane knowledge in this area, but it just doesn't seem to me like the best storage place for poultry. Anyway, enough of where we didn't go; nostalgic for our first encounters with Chinese cuisine via Ken Lo's cookbooks, we decided we should try his restaurant, Memories of China, in Belgravia.

Why do they serve Jasmine tea in Marxist restaurants ?

Because all proper tea is theft boom boom.

Four of us found ourselves hungry in Soho last night, having just seen The Big Tease (an excellent film about a Glasgow hairdresser who goes to LA - you should definitely see it) This venerable Chinese restaurant has been in Soho for as long as anyone can remember, so we entered with confidence. The other three ordered the shredded duck pancake thing and asked for extra pancakes. The waitress said "No". "How many pancakes do we get with the duck for three?" asked M After some thought, the waitress said six, and if we wanted extra, we could ask for them, when we had eaten the first lot. Not an auspicious start to a meal, eh? Despite having been born and raised in Glasgow, M has spent a fair amount of time in LA and has picked up the habit of asking for things which are not on the menu. She has picked up this idea that, as a paying customer, she's entitled to do this. I ordered sesame toast and vegetable dumplings to start, and we chose an assortment of fish and meat dishes, rice and noodles. Getting above ourselves again, we ordered a bowl of soft noodles, which weren't on the menu either. The waitress looked stern, but made no comment and wrote something down. We asked for green tea too "No" said the waitress "Only Jasmine tea".