Chinatown hang-ups

Hung's
Rating: Three stars

Finding good food in Chinatown is a little bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

But this was the mission I set myself last night. And, after half an hour spent googling 'best restaurants in Chinatown', one restaurant kept popping up - Hung's.

Its owners may not have been blessed with a talent for naming restaurants, but the reviews I found online promised that its chefs were a cut above above the rest in Chinatown.

After a rather brusque welcome (the waiter grunted and pointed upstairs and we rightly guessed that this was our intended destination) we decided upon the seafood set menu at £22 per head.

Having just returned from a week spent gorging on fresh lobsters in Cornwall, this may not have been the wisest decision, but as a seafood addict, I need my regular fix.

Seafood broth was the starter of the night. Unfortunately the first mouthful tasted rather like gloopy dishwater. However, the further down the bowl we got, the better it became, and by the final mouthful it was actually very tasty.

The intermediare course was a whole lobster in a ginger and spring onion sauce. Generous in size, the lobster was enjoyable, but the sauce wasn't great - and suffered from the same complaint as the soup - it was just too gloopy.

To follow (and by this point we were pretty stuffed - but this is always the case when visiting Chinatown - right?) we had fried sweet and sour fish, scallops with pak choi and king prawns with asparagus. All of this was accompanied by some lovely king prawn rice that had been steamed in banana leaves. The scallop and king prawn dishes were flavoursome and lived up to the reviews I'd read online. The fish, however, was definitely not the catch-of-the-day and after trying a mouthful, we both decided our stomachs would be grateful if we gave it a wide birth.

Overall Hung's was an improvement on the rest of Chinatown's offerings, but I'm pretty certain there is better Chinese food to be found in London.