Chinese Cricket Club — Restaurant in London

Located within the Hyatt Hotel directly opposite Blackfriars train and tube station, the Chinese Cricket Club is discreetly positioned just inside the hotel’s stone-tiled entrance, to the left at street level. The interior is minimalist, modern, and clean.

We opted for the Jasmine tasting menu, which began with three starters shared between four people. The Hau kah Prawn was fairly average, while the Xiao Long Bao (soup dumplings) were similarly underwhelming. The standout among the starters was the Crispy squid, which was cooked well and had good texture and flavour.

The Peking Duck course was slightly disappointing. The duck itself had an overly fatty skin-to-meat ratio, and while the pancakes were served in a decent quantity, the accompanying sauce lacked depth. The condiments included the usual spring onions and cucumber, but also featured a wedge of ripe pineapple—an unusual and arguably misplaced addition. Overall, the dish felt imbalanced and only average in execution.

The mains followed a similar trend. The seabass in lemon sauce was overly battered, as was the seeet and sour pork making both feel a bit heavy and uninspired. The pepper beef as again average - Flavours were passable but not memorable.

For dessert, we ordered from a small selection however can opt for more deserts from the lounge desert. The standout was the banoffe trifle, which was reasonable in both taste and presentation. The strawberry and cream dessert was average, and the overall dessert course didn’t significantly elevate the meal.

Service throughout was friendly and professional. Wines were available but with a noticeable markup, and the total cost came to around £100 per person.

Overall Verdict: A modern setting with polished service, but the food was inconsistent and too often average for the price point. Worth a visit for the ambience, but food-wise, there’s room for...

We had dinner on a weekday at Chinese Cricket Club. We had the Ruby set menu. There was something old-school about the food and not in a good way. I was unfortunately reminded of the way Chinese cooking used to be in the UK decades ago. Individual dishes were mostly good.

As for individual dishes: The dim sum starters at the beginning were very nice especially the one in the bean curd. -I liked the creamy prawns dish and the three cup chicken. However, the fried seaweed that came with the prawns had a stale oil flavour to it that made it inedible. -The stale oil flavour was also present in the sweet and sour pork dish in the batter around the pork chunks. -The mushroom and bamboo dish tasted as if the ingredients came from tins. -I got the impression that the kitchen went for intensity of flavour over nuance, in the main dishes. -The desserts were nice and the cricket ball-like dessert is visually pleasing of course. For balance it might be better to have one chocolate and one non-chocolate dessert. The matcha cake dessert we got was slightly compressed at the top and not flawless, but that was just a cosmetic issue.

Service was excellent and the meal was decent for the price point, however, we hoped for a wow factor that didn’t materialise from this meal. Perhaps the a la carte menu would have been a...

We went here for a birthday celebration in September. There wasn’t much staff working on the day, though it was a sunday and our group were basically the only group other than one other who were eating there.

the waiter who was taking care of our table wasn’t very polite, it took a while to find him if we needed anything, For example if we needed drinks or wanted to order we had to wait a very long time to get his attention.

I ordered the spring rolls for starters and some chicken in plum sauce for mains. The food itself was nice. However it was extremely over priced.

The spring rolls were £8 and when we asked the waiter about the portion size, he said it would be 4 spring rolls, which made sense if they were going to be large ones, but disappointingly it was just two medium sized spring rolls cut in half, which shocked me. I wouldn’t have paid £8 for something that small, i get 4 larger spring rolls from sainsbury’s for £2.25 and they taste exactly the same!

We had starters, mains and a cake afterwards and i unfortunately left the place still hungry and...