Mr Chu China Palace, 3/10
Telephone 01482 222288
Address St Andrews Quay, Hull
Open All week, noon-midnight. Many 'banquets' available; set meals from £6
Before we begin in earnest, may I make a futile attempt to reassure the gentleman who inspired this review that what follows has nothing to do with snobbery? After the Crewe and Nantwich by election, we've all had our fill of retrograde class warfare, so let me state for John Prescott's benefit that I did not arrive at Mr Chu China Palace in a top hat, insouciantly flicking half-crowns towards the malnourished urchins by the front door. Nor is there any link between this public school product's judgment of what Mr P described, in his memoirs, as "my favourite Chinese restaurant in the world", and the 11-plus failure that rankles him still, a mere 57 years after the event.
No, it is this, and this alone - Mr Chu's is an absolute shocker.
Frankly, I didn't expect it. When last summer I drove to Kirkcaldy to sample Gordon Brown's favourite Chinese, it came as no surprise that New Maxin wasn't great, because you'd no more expect our ascetic PM to take any interest in his food than you would expect him to interrupt John Humphrys with a spirited rendition of Total Eclipse Of The Heart.
But John Prescott? How can a man who so adores his grub ("He scoffs it down, he brings it up again/He's never gonna keep it down," as his friends from Chumbawamba might have it) think so highly of such a place? Why on earth does Mr Chuck love Mr Chu?
The only clue I can find comes from the restaurant's website. One section is entitled "Promototions", hinting that Prezza has been bartering his linguistic skills for prawn crackers, and there's mention elsewhere of "VIP discounts". Yet you would want more than 25% off a crispy duck or nine to dine willingly at a place whose sole redeeming feature was the funny, mischievous Russian waitress who seated me next to the dancefloor on which John may well have tossed the wondrous Pauline over his shoulder to the sound of Bill Haley. When I asked her which of the website-vaunted "four dining areas" we were in, she looked blank. It took me an hour to work out that the thematic styling begins and ends with paper signs reading "Peking", "Shanghai", "Szechuan" and "Canton" stuck on various screens.
"Traditional values in a modern setting" sums this one up, the values being those of a fifth-rate Pekingese restaurant circa 1974, with all the dining areas done out in the same ersatz Imperial manner, with lashings of dragons, hanging lanterns and red lacquering hinting at an MFI summer sale. Added to that little lot, the setting is a gleaming retail park on the banks of the Humber, opposite Currys, Land Of Leather and the other usual suspects.
It's a desultory place, then, and especially so when very few of the tables at "Britain's largest Chinese restaurant" were occupied - for reasons the food wasted little time in explaining to me.
Hot and sour soup is always a useful indicator of Peking cuisine, and Mr Chu's version is a vapid, orangey liquid that's closer in taste and texture to flavoured water than to anything based on chicken stock, altogether lacking the heat of chilli and the sourness of rice wine, and devoid even of the magic ingredient that is sesame oil. Spare ribs, meanwhile, were drab, grey, bulbous, horribly fatty beasts drowned in an overbearing Peking sauce that may, or may not, have been freshly made in the kitchen.
At this stage, and with New Maxin in mind, I was wondering whether their failure to resign over Iraq really constitutes a more compelling reason to hold Messrs Brown and Prescott in contempt than their insane masterplan to make me schlep across the country for awful food. The main courses swiftly settled it.
Kung po chicken was merely inoffensive, although the use of jalapeño rather than Chinese chillies highlighted the lack of culinary pride, while the highest compliment I can pay a collation of bamboo shoots and tree ear mushrooms is that not all the shoots were al dente enough to send a panda scurrying to the emergency dentist.
The coup de grace, however, was "Monk's Delight Vegetable Hot Pot". You have to hope that, after expressing his delight at this dish, that holy figure suffered serious physical damage the next time he engaged in a martial art, because it was a total disgrace. Those of us not granted a VIP discount are asked to pay £7.50 - the mark-up may well be a world record - for a mixture of beansprouts, mangetout, water chestnuts and celery, not casseroled to a lusciously squidgy finish as Chinese hot pots should be, but wok-fried briefly enough to nudge some components towards the diamond-cutting end of the bamboo shoot spectrum. And then, by way of a last-ditch crack at providing some sort of taste, the whole thing had been sprinkled with the sesame oil that strictly belonged in the soup.
A pictorial dessert menu dominated by shop-bought gateaux was the final straw. Speaking of which, Jack, not one word from you about Blackburn's leading Cantonese, please. I've bleedin' had it with this New Labour-Chinese restaurant lark, and no mistake.
The bill
Hot and sour soup £2.90
Peking barbecued spare ribs £4.50
Kung po chicken £7.50
Bamboo shoots and mushrooms £4.50
Monk's Delight hot pot £7.50
Egg-fried rice £2.50
Subtotal £29.40
Tip £5
Total £34.40
