China Brasserie — Restaurant in Horsham

First time here tonight craving a sit down Chinese meal. After deciding not to drive up to our usual in China Town we found China Brasserie, this appears to be one of the only sit down Chinese restaurants near Crawley.

Booked a table easily over the phone, parked in the council carpark 1 minute walk away, £2.50 for 2 hours, free after 8pm.

Shown to our table upstairs promptly upon arrival. The restaurant is in a quirky old chocolate box cottage, think low ceilings, narrow stairs, uneven floors and exposed beams; if you're over 6ft prepare to duck every time you stand up.

The interior is odd for a Chinese restaurant, think old cottage with Tudor beams and the odd Chinese decorative banner or framed design stuck up on the wall.

Service was a mish mash of attentive all the way to having to pop downstairs to find someone.

For starters we tried a mixture of the sticky pork ribs, prawn crackers, 1/4 crispy duck with pancakes, vegetable spring rolls and prawn toast. They forgot the prawn toast which we ended up having with the mains.

Mains we had sweet and sour chicken, egg fried rice, of which there was barely any egg to be seen, and chicken chow mein which came with the thin noodles which it said nothing about on the menu, and was drier than the Sahara, no soy sauce spared here! The sweet and sour chicken was standard, we'd eat it again portion size on the smaller side. The same can't be said for the chow mein or the rice. We also ordered the broccoli in garlic butter, this was delicious but not worth anywhere near £9.15!! The prawn toast was lovely, with full size prawns instead of the usual prawn puree, but at £8.60 for the equivalent of one slice of bread, we wouldn't order it again.

On to puddings. We ordered the ferrero rocher, passion pot and what was supposed to be the Monster Toy (Strawberry ice cream for kids), instead we received the Punky Toy which was vanilla, but our daughter had already eaten half before she informed us so we didn't bother saying anything. I was informed by the person eating the passion pot that it was nice, but tasted more like vanilla than mango.

For all of the above including 3 cokes (Small glass bottles) we paid £103.95.

The atmosphere was strange, one minute there was Christmas music playing quietly, the next there wasn't, then we could hear it playing from downstairs, then suddenly a rap song came on, then back to Christmas music.

All in all, with the simple mistakes made and the odd dishes, including the overpriced dishes, we won't be back and will opt for China town...

I'd been looking forward to trying out this restaurant for a while. As a nut allergy sufferer I always check out menus in advance to see if they look suitable. The China Brasserie was no exception and the menu on their website looked promising, (N) symbols by food I wouldn't be able to eat and a friendly message at the top asking to be made aware of any allergies. When we arrived I told our waitress that I has an allergy but to have nuts in the kitchen was fine, I just couldn't eat them. She asked me if cross contamination was ok to which I answered that it wasn't, I physically can't eat them. She went to talk to chef who told her he would be using the same ladles etc between dishes. That was that really, we had no choice but to leave the restaurant. Our waitress was apologetic but the rest of the staff completely ignored us. It was a surprising and...

I have been taking my family here for over 20 years and have always been very welcomed, but over the last few occasions noticed things not right, but last night was one of the most awful customer services ever. We booked for my sons 18th arrived as a family waited to be shown to a table for quite a while then left for over 12 mins at the table, the atmosphere was terriable most tables grumbling. My oldest son got up and asked the lady waitress could we have some service to be told "you get it when I have time", we all decided to leave upon leaving we were informed by the same lady when we stated we been coming here for years and would complain to the partner "you do that I don't care". Omg I can only say how very dissapointed we all were. I have also lodged an email asking for the partner to...