Golden Day: Chinatown, Sunday September 23rd, 2012

When you eat out as much as I do, you get a feel for the kinds of places to try and those to avoid. Without too much effort, you can gauge whether or not you will like a place just by looking at it. It might sound judgmental and pretentious but it's true.

One early autumn evening last year, the wife and I were invited to try dinner with one of her old colleagues at a place in Chinatown which, apparently, was not a bad sort of place at all and one that we would quite enjoy. Just looking at the offensively orange exterior and the semi-fast food makeup of the inside, I was pretty convinced I would have a hard time here.

And so it proved. (Clearly the review was always going to go this way from an introduction like that.) The meal ambled along and eventually reached the point where I asked the wife and her friend to check with the waiting staff if there was anything on the menu I would actually be able to eat without streaming nose, eyes and other orifices. It was a very spicy evening indeed...

In defence of the place, I did manage to get through some cabbage and some simple pancakes but the glass noodles, served in a bowl of lethal-looking red sauce were exactly that (left). The wife and her friend quite enjoyed them but I could not see it past a few mouthfuls. It was a similar story to more or less everything else on the table, eventually.

Some dry-fried beef would normally have been a reassuring standard-bearer on a night like this, but again the amount of chilli was prohibitively hot for me. The girls got through an impressive-looking but outstandingly spicy hot pan of pig intestine which was fresh and vibrant but far too out there for more than a mouthful for me (right).

That was more or less the story of the evening, sadly. The place was not appealing, the food too spicy and generally not to my taste at all. In the interest of balance, the wife's opinion was a little more relaxed than mine, saying that as a Chinese restaurant, it was pretty average, though she did not appreciate the service. It did seem to be rather slow-paced and lackadaisical throughout the evening. Their answer to some non-spicy fare for me was a dish we already had on the table but I had found too spicy...

I would not recommend this place but I suppose I am not the person to ask about an overtly spicy restaurant in Chinatown. It clearly is not one of the West End's hotspots for Asian food though, so I am a little vindicated in my general dislike of this place. For very spicy, average Chinese grub in an annoyingly orange atmosphere, it doesn't get much better than this.