After the success of our breakfast reviews, and Atalay's Kebab Van being crowned Britain's best last night, we have listened to all your comments and decided that we will be reviewing Thame's best takeaway next.
The aim of the review is to find out Thame's best Chinese, Indian, Chippy tea, Pizza and Kebab. After reviewing each one we will announce an overall winner of Thame's best takeaway. After a short break from reviewing breakfasts our foodie is back and on the hunt again, to find Thame's best takeaway.
First category up is everyone's favourite: the Chinese takeaway. To keep the review fair we decided that there should be two main dishes, two sides and then some prawn crackers. The review will be based upon not only what's the best quality, taste and portion size, but also what is best value for money.
Thame has four Chinese takeaways: Sun Chinese Food, Famous House, Harvest Moon and Ming's Chinese Takeaway.
The dishes we decided our foodie should sample are:
- Sweet and Sour Chicken with egg fried rice
- Beef Chow Mein
- Prawn Toast
- Chicken Satay Sticks
- Prawn Crackers
" After the breakfast review challenge and a Christmas where I certainly over indulged, I thought it best that I started the year with a diet to shift the extra few pounds I'd added over the past year. So with a 2 month diet behind me and back to a reasonable weight again I couldn't wait to get another review under way, and what better way to do it, than a takeaway review. Thame has so much to offer on the takeaway front, I knew this wasn't going to be a quick challenge. As you could imagine, even I couldn't handle this amount of food on my own, so my partner will be helping me throughout the review, they of course didn't need much convincing...
So first up in my review was Sun Chinese Food, ordering at 7pm on a Friday night, prime time takeaway time, I thought I might be in for a wait for my food. But as I placed my order I was delighted to be told that it would be ready in 15 minutes. What a result...
After a short trip in the car and a further 1o minutes trying to find a parking space (perhaps an issue for another day) I returned home with my mouth salivating from the delicious smells I'd been inhaling on my car journey back.
The total cost of my Chinese from Sun Chinese Food was £25.45, which seemed reasonable given the amount of food I'd ordered. Some Chinese takeaways throw in the prawn crackers for free if you spend a certain amount, but it didn't look like this was the case from Sun.
So to start ...the sides, chicken satay sticks - I thought these were great value for money, as I opened the box I was delighted to find six chicken sticks. The chicken sticks had the perfect amount of spice to them, and the chicken was cooked to perfection and not dry at all.
Next up was the prawn toast, once again I was hugely impressed with the portion size, they were well cooked and there was great proportion of prawns to toast.
Now to the mains!
Sweet and sour chicken with egg fried rice. The chicken here, as with the satay sticks was cooked to perfection. The dish came with green peppers, pineapple and onion. The only fault I found was the chicken had a distinct lack of sauce. This type of dish can become very dry quickly if there isn't enough sauce to mop the rice up with. So it meant I left more rice than I'd of liked as the sauce mainly clung to the chicken rather than dispersing onto the rest of the plate.
The beef chow mein was next up, and following on from the earlier theme, Sun certainly isn't shy to stuff their dishes with meat. There was plenty of beef to go around! A chow mein dish is a good test for Chinese food in my opinion. If there is too much sauce then the noodles can go soggy, too little sauce and the dish can become very dry. On this occasion i would say it was close to being right but still a little soggy for the perfect dish!
Overall I'd say this was a great start to the review, I was really impressed with portion sizes and for the price I felt it was good value for money. Only minor issues being sauce proportions on the dishes. I'm very excited to see next week brings!"
Stay tuned for Round 2 of our Chinese takeaway review - do you have your favourite Thame takeaway? Get in touch and tell us where, and why!
