爱丁堡Master江湖 — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

This was the worst meal of my life. To start with, my colleague and I entered the restaurant just before 2pm and the owner (or waiter) checked his watch and after huffing and puffing he gave us a table. We ordered spring rolls, salt and pepper calamari, ginger and spring onion chicken and green curry. The only edible dish was the spring rolls. The chicken in both main was absolutely dry and didn't taste fresh at all. There was no flavour in the sauce and the rice tasted like as if it was reheated. When we asked for the bill ( with all dished untouched) the man asked if we wanted a bag to take away and we explained that the food was of very poor quality. He tried to explain that Asian chicken taste like that because of the way they treat it - we both had Asian chicken before, that chicken wasn't fresh. Anyway, the last insult came when he said he would have given us a discount ...from £45 to £41!! Really disappointing service and food....

Any restaurant which has lotus root on the menu is one which I'll gladly try. This restaurant has two very different dishes featuring lotus, both tasty. But as much as I love lotus, the two stars of the meal, for me, were the smashed cucumber in garlic - which was fresh, sprightly, and mellow rather than wet and harsh with raw garlic as is often the case - and the bean sprouts in vinegar and garlic, which was simple and stunningly delicious. Accompanying this, I had the unadorned hand-pulled noodles, which were perfect with everything else. Portions were very generous, nothing was greasy or salty, and the spicing was...

It's hard to get everything right when your menu is as long as a Russian classic novel. There are a good range of actual Chinese dishes available here, things you would see on a menu in Shanghai or Chengdu, but they are not executed as well as they could be. I had the lotus root store fry, beef in chilli oil and green beans fried with garlic and mince, all very basic Chinese dishes, and only the beans were really good.

Give it a shot of you want to see what Chinese food in China tastes like, it's definitely closer than your average British...