Wednesday 31 October 2012

Hong Kong Wok, Sheffield

Hong Kong Wok is a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant, one of several on the London Road strip. I doubt it serves the best food in the vicinity, but the staff are friendly, prices low and portions enormous. Just the thing for a casual, low key Friday night.

There's a full menu of individual dishes, covering all the usual Cantonese stuff and a few Sichuan dishes, and a great big long list of one plate meals, appropriately named 'Wok Woppas'. Appropriately named as they are indeed whoppers.


We started, customarily but completely unnecessarily with some crispy duck and pancakes, and a bowl of chicken and sweetcorn soup just to make sure. Then onwards to our woppas.

I can't recall ever having been served a single plate of food so unfeasibly large, certainly not for £6.50 anyway. I had the ma po tofu (on rice), a classic Sichuan dish that's supposed to be tofu, some sort of mince (beef or pork) and some vegetables in an oily broth laced with chillies and Sichuan pepper. Depending on how you wish to translate it you might like to call the dish 'pockmarked old woman's tofu' or perhaps 'leprous old crone's tofu'. Yum.


Slightly disturbing names aside, done right this is a really satisfying dish that warms the cockles with layers of chilli heat and numbing spice (ma la) from the Sichuan pepper. This version was tasty enough, hot and savoury, but completely lacking in the ma la element leaving it a bit one dimensional. The sauce was a bit too cornflour-gloopy as well.

AS had a serviceable and also humongous plate of special fried rice, most of which we took home for Saturday lunch.

With a couple of booze drinks the bill was still less than thirty quid, but you could be in and out for well under a tenner a head if you stick to the one plate meals. The food wasn't brilliant but I'm still rather enamoured with the place; everything was just so generous. Plenty of food, friendly service, free ice cream for afters and fortune cookies!

6/10

200-204 London Road
Sheffield
S2 4LW

http://www.hkwok.co.uk/

HK Wok on Urbanspoon

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