Bamboo House, New Park Road
OK, so let's be honest! I have taken my foot off the gas with this project. Some might suspect that my interest was waning. Don’t be fooled, I am very much alive and kicking but also please don't underestimate the hardship I have undertaken. The sacrifices both my family and I are making! The unhealthy calorie intakes every 3-4 weeks, not to mention the artery blocking increase in levels of saturated fats we’re taking in. I can feel my pancreas twinge at even the mention of sweet and sour sauce! Then there’s the crushing financial implications as I destroy my kid’s futures! Every crunch of prawn cracker is a step further away from their potential further education!
OK, this isn't all for sympathy! I don't want you to think of me as a martyr….yet….that’s for the future! Maybe when you're all gathered by my side as I’m lowered into the ground in a coffin lined with prawn crackers, on a cushion of underwhelming singapore noodles. You all toss dry, underseasoned chips onto my coffin as you say your final goodbyes.
‘He went how he wanted to live, drowning in average curry sauce from an OK chinese takeaway’.....
OK, so this is yet another long winded way of me introducing another installment on my search for a great Chinese takeaway in Shrewsbury. This time it’s a late comer to the party. A recommendation that I still haven't actually added to the original directory. One that someone privately messaged me to say it was amazing! These are the sorts of messages that reinvigorate this withered, sweet and sour sauce saturated and increasingly poor geezer. They are the defibrillators of this project! I need more of them….PLEASE SEND MORE!.....OK?!
In this case it was about Bamboo House, New Park Road up around Castlefields way, somewhere near the flaxmill!
Their menus on Just Eat but you can’t order from there. I am absolutely in love with this! You get all the benefits of the Just Eat system without supporting those awful sharks and you aren’t giving the Just Eat fat cats a single penny to fuel their pursuit in destroying our precious food systems and industry! It really feels like a great display of dominance by Bamboo House, a real 2 fingers up to the supposed ‘system’.
If Bamboo House and Just Eat were baboons, Bamboo House would have the biggest, reddest arse in the Shrewsbury savannah and they would be waving it at Just Eat in a flagrant demonstration of dominance! Bamboo House are high in my estimations now!
It’s phone ordering and cash on delivery! These days, this is my norm, my status quo! I’m more than OK with it! You might say almost confident!
The Order:
Hot And Sour Soup
Chicken Yuk Sung
Singapore Noodles
Szechuan Mixed Vegetables
Chips
Curry Sauce
Sweet & Sour Sauce
OK Sauce
Prawn Crackers (FOC)
Spring Rolls (FOC)
The Price……
A Wallet Pleasing £40.40
£40.40 seemed beyond reasonable! Hopes of potentially the best value takeaway to date! Far from the extortionate prices Just Eat create through their own greed. Maybe it’s now my turn to wave my bright red Baboon arse at them? OK, no one needs to see that!
Before you panic, I remembered to ask about prawn crackers! We are not going through that debacle again......good news, the prawn crackers were included! Bad news, they don’t do fortune cookies! Another see-saw to balance in my evaluation of mediocre food!
Delivery was quick and prompt, providing a welcome break from the healthcare I was being forced to administer to a toy baby by our 4 year old! My first impressions of the delivery was that it was absolutely boiling hot! An almost unfathomable temperature! I actually burnt my hands getting it out of the box. My once armour plated, heat resistant hands are now extremely delicate and I would do well to remember that!.....and as my wife keeps telling me, to moisturise more!
Everything was wrapped in cling film. Really hot, now stretchy cling film! Breaking into this potentially delicious Oriental vault was fast turning into a process requiring planning like an Ocean’s 11 style heist.
We took a few breaks to give our hands a rest from the heat and enjoyed tucking into the chips. I say enjoyed, it was a welcome relief from the consistent steam burns we weren’t enjoying! The chips were fine - nice and crunchy with the typical chewiness you get from any delivered chips. No seasoning but one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken from this journey has been my knowledge that that is actually how they are supposed to be!
After what seemed like an age, the heat was still emanating from just about every element of this takeaway but maybe that was the 14 layers of plastic insulation each tub was wrapped in. Stripping off layer by layer a really great smell started to fill the kitchen.
First glance and the Yuk Sung seems wet and an unfortunate grey/brown colour, not our preference on either count and all the sauces were confusingly runny! Not something I am akin to on this project. The sweet and sour sauce also lacked the synonymous gloop and 80s neon glare! Almost pourable and almost a real colour! Hard to tell how the prawn crackers were going to cope and it's at this point that you start to wonder if over gloopiness is actually what you want from a Chinese sauce!....Another question to answer, great! Could it be that these sauces are actually made fresh and in house and not just poured from a lead lined canister to prevent the glow from registering on a geiger counter 1000 miles away? The curry sauce wasn't too thick, on first chip dunk, it seemed quite plain or was it just lacking a comforting level of ultra processing?
Bamboo House seem to be posing more questions than answers, which seems to pose it’s own question about whether that's a good thing or not?
Surely (hoping) the answers are in the eating!
Unfortunately the answers were in the eating and left me feeling like maybe eating any of it wasn't the most intelligent move I’ve made! So much of this was bizarrely off the mark.
The curry sauce had a decent level of spice to it but lacked any level of depth, it wasn’t just missing seasoning, it just about missed every mark apart from some raw tasting spices. It was too sweet and just very one dimensional. It crossed my mind that maybe it was lacking MSG and this was in fact a freshly made sauce.
Over sweetness seemed to be a theme to a lot of the food. The sweet and sour was far more sweet than sour and tasted unlike any other sweet and sour sauce so far.
So many parts of this takeaway didn’t fulfil it’s own promises. The Hot & Sour soup, while hot in one sense (arriving at almost boiling point) lacked any chilli heat. Posing another question, is Hot & Sour Soup hot from heat or hot from chilli? I’ve always assumed chilli. Unless you're in certain parts of Spain or a UK truck stop, I’d say hot from heat is an unmentioned prerequisite for soup, an expectation almost? The soup ran with the familiar theme of over sweetness and like the curry sauce, just lacked an overall depth of flavour.
The Yuk Sung was of the wet variety….the very wet variety! Something we have encountered on this journey, something we now know is not our bag. This one was overly wet and the once crispy noodles had been dumped in with the sauce so it was all in all a bit of a wet mess!....rare for me to complain about a wet mess……The flavour of the Chicken Yuk Sung was actually pretty good but the textures just let the whole thing down. Maybe with some crispy noodles it might have been better. Plus the nuclear heat of everything had really wilted the lettuce in the box so even that was a bit floppy! It’s rare to find anything that’s better floppy……..as my wife…….
One of the very rare positives of this experience was the szechuan veg. Although feeling more black peppery than szechuan peppery, it wasn't too gloopy, had a nice colour to the sauce and the veg was OK considering those poor vegetables had spent a good amount of time in a molten furnace! My search for decent Szechuan food on this journey is really running out of steam. I’m wondering if Szechuan pepper is even being used and whether all these takeaways are pulling the wool over our eyes with black pepper? We don’t want to incite a peppery horsegate scandal and with absolutely zero evidence, we’ll give them all the benefit of the doubt.
The highlight was definitely the Singapore Noodles. A dish where the bit of extra sweetness was to its benefit thanks to the decent peppery heat. Similar to the Szechuan Veg, it just felt a little better balanced.
The menu at Bamboo House is a little more intriguing than other takeaways. With a few dishes that maybe aren't as prescriptive as usual. You can have a portion of Happy Family - something I often crave when the kids are being kids. The Wandering Dragon sounds exciting or the Ying Yong Chicken has an approachable intrigue about it.
Then down in the sauces section there is something that just sounds too good to miss…….the OK Sauce………
Surely anything labelled as OK is putting itself out there with an air of understated self confidence. How are you at cooking, Steve? Yeah, I’m OK……..it’s a protective layer, an imposter syndrome armour plating that levels off expectations. There’s a quiet confidence with the label ‘OK’. A confidence that I always find intriguing.
If your expectation is OK; and let’s face it, my expectations for any of this project have been all but buried in a mountain of average food; then it’s really hard not to reach or even exceed that conjecture. OK is a safety blanket and a crash mat for potential failure, the perfect guise for putting your neck on the line……what could go wrong…….
9 times out of 10, if you described something you did or made as terrible, it’s going to be OK. If you say something is OK, surely it’s going to be good, potentially even great. What I am trying to explain is my thought process when I see a sauce labelled as ‘OK Sauce’......surely that is a sauce I need to try. An understated, maybe even over achieving sauce? A sauce that is not on any other menu so far but one that might well be delicious!
I couldn't have been more wrong, it was bloody awful! I am a lover of condiments! I genuinely can’t remember the last condiment I didn't love. They make just about everything better. Apart from OK Sauce which just seems to make things a lot worse! It had the Bamboo House calling cards of being overly sweet and quite one dimensional whilst having the totally uncharacteristic Bamboo House quality of also being far too sour. It was too gingery and too peppery while also lacking any level of saltiness or seasoning. There were some reminiscent flavours of a terrible, heartburn inducing, cheap brown sauce but one that had been tinkered with in the kitchen for far too long. Any ingredients added until you were left with a huge vat of something new and alien. Something non-descript. Something they then decided to call OK sauce. My acid reflux pulsates and my stomach lining retracts at just the thought of it.
It originally caused a minor existential crisis where I had to completely rethink my self-branding as being OK. Am I this bad? It was short lived because let’s face it ‘No, no I'm not. Nothing is that bad!’ The result was actually a boost in confidence. Freedom from my OK shackles! Maybe I am more than OK. Maybe this is why it’s called OK sauce……a rejuvenating tonic that boosts confidence to make you really feel like you are more than OK....if this is the case, I'll chuck it down my gullet by the gallon! I’ll be a superhero…..or at least an OK superhero!
All joking aside, I googled it and OK Sauce is a branded sauce by Colman’s. One which has slipped through my condimental net! It is basically brown sauce with added ingredients (and there I was labelling my palate as merely OK) and there is a claim that it actually represents ‘a testament to the multicultural fabric of the UK's culinary scene’ and ‘has also become a cornerstone in British Chinese cuisine’.....the only thing it should be the corner stone of is a U-bend!
This was without question the biggest let down of a takeaway so far. Flavours were all over the place but worst of all, everything left a really unpleasant mouthfeel. Every dish seemed to have a greasy afterburn and left us all with what can only be described as ‘slippery lips’ (which has been added to my list of potential band names for when I meet a group of lost and extremely talented musicians). Funnily enough, Slippery Lips’ first album will be ‘Teetering On Unpleasant’ which would be a great way to summarise the food.
This takeaway tasted like food I cook when I’m drunk. When I have lost sense of not just my senses but all of reality. Like my dart playing, there is a sweet spot when I’m drinking where I can’t go wrong, followed by nothing but abject failure.. 1-2 pints and I’m like the Phil Taylor of cooking, unstoppably consistent and a safe bat at all times! 3-4 pints and I become Luke Littler (a little less consistent but way more adventurous and something you can’t help but watch and admire) 5+ pints and I’m Kevin Painter; old, angry, absolutely no one's cup of tea and just a bit shit - clinging onto ‘that one time’ that things went well for me.
It feels like actual Kevin Painter might have cooked this takeaway!
If you weren't sure of my true feelings, then I can summarise by simply letting you know that I didn’t even finish my first plate, let alone go back for seconds and I didn’t even contemplate trying it cold! Something so entirely shocking to my wife that she used this as a short review to tell her best friend….‘must have been bad, Steve didn’t even finish what was on his plate’.
We have to be real, this could have been an off night for Bamboo House. We all have them and we are all allowed to have them. I’m not sure how much actual gravitas Just Eat reviews have but theirs is healthy so maybe it was just a bad night. But with about another 5000 average takeaways to eat before I’m free of this project, I have zero time nor inclination in finding out!
On one final note, for those of you rightfully concerned about food waste, I am pleased to let you know it wasn't wasted. I used it to make some leftover chinese pancakes for lunch the following day - go check out my insta!
