Randomness Guide to London Menu

Chinese restaurant on Tower Bridge Road in Bermondsey. It's located in the premises previously occupied by Super Nova and before that by Sanh Hing. As well as the usual anglicised Cantonese stuff, the menu includes regional Chinese food from Sichuan, Dongbei (North-East China), and Shanghai.

bob visited on a Wednesday lunchtime in December 2011, along with a few colleagues.

Sichuan double-cooked pork (四川回鍋肉; £7.50) was quite good; suitably porky and chillified, with plenty of peppers and carrots too. The plate was decorated with a bird carved out of carrot.

Dan dan noodles (擔擔麵; £5.50) was a bit lacking in chilli oil, so the noodles stuck together a bit even after I mixed it all up. The pork was quite coarsely minced. When I ordered this, the waitress warned me that it was very spicy, but to my palate it was just averagely hot.

I tried to order an aubergine dish as well, but the waitress misheard the number and I instead ended up with sliced fish in hot chilli oil (味緣水煮魚; £13.80). The fish in this was somewhat overcooked, and the dish could have done with more chilli oil. There were also an awful lot of beansprouts in the dish.

Some of our party tried out the less interesting section of the menu too, including the £5 lunch deal which gets you one dish plus rice. A couple had soups from this section too, and reported that neither the chicken and sweetcorn soup (£3.20) nor the mixed vegetable soup (£2.80) tasted of much, though the portions were large.

Tea was £1.50/person; quite a decent jasmine tea, and the teapot was topped up frequently.

The food was a bit slow to arrive, even though they weren't busy — we seemed to be the first customers of the day. They asked us to order by number instead of by the name of the dish, which led to the mishap described above; they did give us a 10% discount on the entire bill because of this, though.

See also:

• Photos of the takeaway menu as of December 2011: p1, p2 (note that this is just a subset of the full restaurant menu)
• Chowhound thread
• Southwark News review
• LondonSE1 comments