Modest surroundings but meal that leaves you bowled over Review
Neil Docking enjoys a tasty Chinese at The Cherry House
IN my experience, a truly great Chinese restaurant is hard to find. Sure, there are plenty of good ones, especially here in the North West, with Liverpool’s impressive Chinatown district instantly springing to mind.
But how many times have you been out for a Chinese and been genuinely bowled over by the meal?
It seems to me that usually it’s a lot easier to find a quality Indian restaurant than an eatery offering fantastic food from the Far East.
Fortunately that isn’t the case in Ormskirk, a town that can legitimately claim to have two top Chinese restaurants.
Many people will have heard of the Peacock Inn at The Stiles, an example of fine Chinese dining, but with a price tag to match its swanky interior.
However, the Chinese restaurant that has most people talking on TripAdvisor is the lesser known destination The Cherry House on County Road.
Once just a takeaway, this restaurant is set in the modest surroundings of a twostorey, end of terrace house, next to a run of shops and a spacious car park.
But don’t be fooled by its outwardly appearance, because once inside this is a tastefully decorated venue, which is light, bright, warm and welcoming.
The staff were chatty but did not impose and, after showing us to our table, gave us plenty of time to choose from the varied menu.
We plumped for the House Special Banquet – available to a minimum of two or more diners for £26.90 per head. What better way to judge a restaurant than to give its top offering a try?
The waiter was more than happy for us to swap a couple of things that were not to our liking, so I went for the hot chicken Tom Yam soup, while my wife had the House Special Soup, which was particularly fishy. There wasn’t anything dodgy about it – it just contained a lot of fish.
My soup had a strong, spicy tomato flavour with thick strips of chicken, while the House Special was bursting with crab and prawns, with quite a thick texture. There were plenty of prawn crackers on the side and we were off to a good start.
Next was the ‘Combinations’ starter platter, which included chicken skewers, barbecue ribs, spring rolls, crispy king prawn dumplings and crispy seaweed.
The chicken skewers were brilliant and came with lots of satay sauce with big peanut chunks, while the dumplings were a good balance of tasty filling and crispy pastry, and were perfect dipped in the Hoi Sin sauce.
The ribs had plenty of meat, smothered in sticky sauce, the spring rolls were spring rolls (what can you say about spring rolls?) and the crispy seaweed was indeed crispy and very sweet. These were not massive portions, but very satisfying. Quality over quantity.
Aromatic crispy duck was then brought to our table and shredded with customary skill and precision, served alongside leeks, cucumber, more Hoi Sin sauce and light pancakes.
There was a generous amount for two people and some wonderfully fatty bits of skin to fight over.
For the main we ditched the sizzling fillet steak Peking sauce in favour of my favourite, crispy chilli beef, and kept the stir fried lamb with spring onions.
This came with a colossal amount of young chow fried rice. Tremendous.
The crispy chilli beef was quite thin and very crispy, but extremely tasty. We were less keen on the stir fried lamb, which was a tad salty for our tastes, but the rice was full of prawns, char sui and well flavoured. Oh, and certainly filling!
After all that we might not have ordered desert, but sticking to the set menu were served up a lovely treat in the form of mixed toffee fruits. This consisted of deep fried, battered apple and banana, in a crispy toffee casing, which was softly melted in warm water at our table, resulting in a crunchy delight.
It was a cracking meal and I’m glad to report that the drinks were reasonably priced too, with the Tiger beer a notch above the Tsingtao.
The staff were excited to mention that they will be celebrating the Chinese New Year next Monday, with a special buffet priced £25 per head and a lion dancing routine (as the waiter pointed out, that’s lion, not line dancing!) If I was you I’d get involved – apparently you can come and watch for free, even if you’re not dining.