Mandarin Kitchen

Mandarin Kitchen Restaurant Review:

A few minutes' walk from Kensington Gardens, in London's most ethnically mixed thoroughfare, you'll find this Chinatown-style restaurant. Staff, dressed in silver-grey, is fast, generally efficient and sometimes friendly. Tables in the front are more desirable than those in the cavern at the rear. There have been changes in the kitchen and the cooking is not as reliable as before. Although fifty meat, chicken and duck dishes are offered too, seafood is the meat of the menu. Lobsters prepared in six ways, although wild and Scottish, will sing, but won't play bagpipes. Crabs, from the south or southwest coast, may be baked, but the signature dish---pot of crab with bean noodles and dry shrimps in chilli sauce---requires fingers as well as spoon and chopsticks as eating implements. House wines are acceptable. Set meals from £10.90.