Randomness Guide to London - Differences between Version 2 and Version 1 of New Laughing Buddha, W1D 5BP

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Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, located on Macclesfield Street just south of Shaftesbury Avenue. It's right next door to De Hems, and indeed this is probably its main advantage; other than that, it's just a standard Chinatown restaurant which does the job but is certainly nothing special.

Kake, Bob, Nick, Leon, and Richard visited on a Monday evening in January 2008. No trouble getting a table; the place was almost empty. Our waiter seemed rather confused, returning to the table multiple times to check our order.

The menu is very long, covering all the usual dishes; there's also a section of chef's specials which includes some more interesting dishes. We started with mixed hors d'oeuvres (I think this was around £3.50/head); lowlights of this were the rather tough and dry chicken on skewers and the overly sweet sauce on the spare ribs. Main courses were somewhat better; the cuttlefish and jellyfish dish had nice chunks of garlic in, and the frogs' legs were tender with crisp, freshly fried batter. Pork belly and preserved vegetable hotpot had a decent quantity of both pork and preserved vegetable but was let down by its undistinguished and rather gloopy sauce and its lack of resemblance to an actual hotpot. Mussels were a bit chewy.

They also offer an all-you-can-eat menu, which I think is around £13/head; the way it works is that you can order as much as you like, as many times as you like, from a limited menu.

Fairly small seating area downstairs, more tables upstairs. The staircase is quite narrow. Ladies' toilet is upstairs (not sure if there's also one downstairs); gents' is downstairs. The upstairs ladies' is a single cubicle which was not very clean on our visit (thick layers of dust on all horizontal surfaces).

Kake's verdict: Probably won't bother coming back here; there are plenty of other choices in the area.

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Last visited by Kake, Bob, Nick, etc, 14 January 2008.

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