GASTRONOMY REVIEW: Peace Garden Chinese Restaurant, Manchester.

With a plethora of established and well-known Chinese restaurants all over Manchester (especially in the central area known as China Town), can the city support yet another? This was the question I wanted to find out when visiting this restaurant on Booth Street (half way down and close to the RNCM in a very 'studenty' area), having been open now for only three months.

The Peace Garden is so-named due to the false greenery all over the internal decor, adorned with white doves. A warm and pleasant atmosphere inside, and the waiting staff were always around and happy to help. We were at ease and the augurs were good.

The menu - and indeed the food - caters, by and large, for the Chinese themselves. The menu is written in Chinese with English translation, but just in case anything does get lost in translation (as is so often the case), the menu supplies helpful photographs of each dish too.

My companion and I started with aromatic duck (a standard but a favourite of ours) with Jasmine tea. Both of us were more than happy with these. It was the main courses which, to our surprise and sadness, caused a lot of problems.

Neither of us were presented with the main course that we had ordered (lost in translation...!), however my companion decided - for the sake of ease more than anything else - to stick with it despite it being flavourless and unappetising; both dishes were pigs' trotter dishes, and so at least there was a similitude. However, my main dish was something of a saga, so I shall try and precis as best I can... I ordered lamb chop and goji berry soup. I was presented with a soup which was extremely fatty and anemic with no goji berries to be seen anywhere. I mentioned the lack of goji berries to the waitress who took the soup back to the kitchen and returned with the same dish with a few floating on top of this fatty liquid. I tried it... it was pure fat. I pulled out the meat from the depths, and found that it was not lamb at all but pork belly. Not only was it pork belly, but the fat from the belly had been slow cooked and made the whole soup quite vile and inedible. It was like eating weak gravy with melted fat and dripping! However, no matter how nicely and/or persistently we complained and mentioned that it was neither what I had ordered nor was it edible; we were smiled at pleasantly and told that the pictures in the menu are not necessarily meant to represent what the food actually looks like...! No apology and no admittance of being in the wrong. They did however, offer to bring us a complimentary dessert, conversely having the nerve to add a service charge to the bill though!

I think that given the number of excellent Chinese restaurants already doing very well in Manchester, it won't be long before The Peace Garden disappears from view. The fat from the few spoons of soup I did ingest stayed with me for two days after the visit!

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall