The Observer
Jay Rayner happily followed up a reader’s tip to a Sichuan restaurant in the ‘Little Chinatown’ near Harrow-on-the-Hill station – his boyhood stomping ground – where he found “thrill-seeker’s” comfort eating in bowls of food “so powerful and so intricately layered that it demands your full attention”.
With its wipe-down tables, laminated menus and soft drinks from the plastic bottle, “Panda’s Kitchen does not do fancy” – but the cooking more than compensated.
Stand-out dishes included Sichuan Mao roast duck – “a quiet showstopper” – and red-braised lamb using potato as a thickener which was “very much Sichuan” but “also shakes hands with things like scouse from Liverpool or Monmouth stew from Wales, those dishes that make a little prized and expensive meat go so much further through the alchemy of seasoning and time”.
Jay Rayner - 2024-08-25
