Let me first admit that I knew nothing about this restaurant before we booked a table, but after having lived in Taipei for nearly five years, sometimes back in the UK I crave some authentic Chinese food. I found Chop Chop via a Google search for "best Chinese restaurants", and decided to book a table based upon the rave reviews.
Booking a table online was useful, as it eliminated the possibility of being misunderstood over the phone, and also enabled the reservation to be changed from Saturday 6pm to Sunday 6pm with no difficulty.
Chop Chop bills itself as serving Northern Chinese cuisine, which is considerably different to the more common Cantonese or Szechuanese cuisine served in most UK Chinese restaurants or takeaways. Northern Chinese cuisine is typically less highly spiced, and more based around noodles, and Chop Chop's menu reflects this.
When we arrived, first impressions were not favourable. First of all, the restaurant was three quarters empty, yet we were seated in one corner with all the other guests, giving me and my partner no privacy whatsoever.
The menu only had about four pages, with only a few dishes for each kind of meat, not giving justice to the wide variety of Northern Chinese food there is. The waiter was friendly and engaging, but seemed to be unfamiliar with the items on the menu (especially considering the small number of items available). There was no problem ordering tapwater, and we received a large jug with two glasses.
When the food was served, the waiter got two of our orders wrong, serving us boiled instead of fried dumplings and beef chao mian instead of the lamb chao mian ordered.
My dish of fish balls was served first, with no rice for another five minutes, during which it got cold. All the rest of the food was served almost simultaneously, which wouldn't have been a problem had the table not been so tiny that we couldn't fit it all on. I had to ask again for the rice, because the waiter had apparently forgotten about it.
The noodle based dishes were just average. The noodles were apparently made in the restaurant, but they tasted like ordinary instant noodles. In fact, they compared unfavourably to the store bought noodles I had stirfried the day before. The vegetarian dish of noodles in peanut and mustard sauce was "surprising", as described on the menu. However, it was the overcooked mushiness of the noodles, and their bland flavouring that was the surprise.
The dumplings were perhaps the biggest disappointment: the filling was small and the taste of it (something I really like) was completely overpowered by the saltiness of the skin. On top of that, guotie are supposed to be boiled and then lightly fried, whereas the thing we got was fried so hard it was tough to bite through, with charred spots on it. After the rave reviews that Chop Chop's dumplings have received, I can only imagine that those writers have never tasted genuine guotie. At a cost of £1 per dumpling, (£8 per serving) I expect something better.
On a more positive note: the waiters were all very friendly and the fish balls were quite nice.
However, having been to excellent Chinese restaurants like the Red Chilli in Leeds, I would not count this place among the good, let alone the best, Chinese restaurants in the UK. read more
