The Cantonese Kitchen
97 Unthank Rd
Norwich
Norfolk
United Kingdom
NR2 2PE
01603 614605
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The Monetgues and the Capulets, Spears and Federline, Brown and Cameron, Lily Allen and everyone, these are just some of the intruiging rivalries we have become all too familiar with. And on the busiest street of Norwich's student district, two Chinese takeaways battle for supremacy, and the coins and notes of hungry adolescents. On the west, Hong Kong Chinese Food, and on the east, the Cantonese Kitchen. As it was the closest, I had always previously opted for the former, and such was the quality of the food I had never found reason to stray. It was, all in all, a happy union. Still, if you stand still you can become stale, set in your ways, complacent. I would hate to think I had missed out on a superior eatery just because I couldn't bring myself to break out of my comfort zone. Time to leave the Shire and go on an adventure. To the shops. A further two hundred yards or so down the road. So, not really a very adventurous sort of adventure, but still enough to provide some sense of having earnt the food that was to follow.
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As kitchens go, this didn't really look like one. Maybe It's my limited experience of kitchens, maybe I've been doing it wrong, maybe they all look like this apart from mine, but to my untrained eye, this looked like a bare white room. It had more common with a dentist's waiting room than a kitchen, albeit without the dog eared copies of Country Life and Prima magazine lying on a central coffee table. The food all seemed to appear, somewhat miraculously and magically, through a hatch positioned low down on the far wall by the floor. It seemed a little unconventional. Did we trust the hatch? Where exactly was our food coming from? Sweeney Todd? Narnia? Who could be completely sure? In this tale of two takeaways, it's the little things that become important. For one thing, everything here seemed to be about ten pence more expensive than at the Hong Kong, and although this didn't translate to much of a price difference overall, it was still giving the competition an unecessary edge. Secondly, my pancake roll wasn't particuarly convincing. It tasted like a collection of sad, wilted vegetables in a bodybag of tracing paper. Still, I could take solace in increased quantity of chowmein I received, although the chips were a bit pale and lifeless. Presumably there must be a high enough volume of students and others whose preference is simply based upon convenience to keep both of these businesses afloat, but on a street which also offers a Subway, an Indian takeaway, a fish and chip shop and a kebab shop, mediocre isn't really an adjective you can afford being associated with you. Unfortunately for the Cantonese Kitchen, that's exactly what it is.
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