At first glance, Mahayana looks promising. Their menu is exciting, split into well-organized sections: starters, dim sum, Chinese, Japanese, vegetarian and finally desserts. You can easily pick out your favorites, but don't keep your expectations too high, mind you me. Most allergens (gluten, mushrooms, nuts, dairy etc.) are listed.
Mahayana claims to be Asian fusion, but I personally believe you cannot take the name of one dish and make it completely unrecognizable, and justify it as "fusion". Take for example the Chicken Gong Bao, 宮保雞丁...usually a very straight forward dish, known to most who have been to China. Firstly, there was not a single piece of chili, and the sauce was sweet & sour, with chunks of all different kinds of vegetables that have virtually nothing to do with gongbao. The restaurant also let you chose the level of spicy, and have a range of mild, medium and spicy (spicy being "very spicy and for those who are used to eating such"). Spicy wasn't spicy, not even a little; and I believe restaurants lose credibility when allowing guests to choose, but not cooking the dish according to their wishes. There were better tasting dishes among our company, but I'm not sure what they all were.
The dim sum was stale and nowhere close to fresh. The sauces that came with where however quite interesting, I only wish the waitress had bothered to introduce them properly. Because yes, this was my second issue with Mahayana. Their service was barely OK. None of the dishes were properly introduced, and the waitress' movements were very brisk and felt a little rude. This was perhaps the closest thing Mahayana came to being Chinese, their major lack of service mindedness.
I do not recommend getting cocktails here, as they are either too strong, too sweet or too sour.
This restaurant is perhaps best suited for someone bringing in a lot of people, where most have very limited knowledge of Southeast Asian cuisine. The restaurant is huge, and there's room for several long tables, that could probably seat more than 20 people.
To be honest, I find the food at cheap takeaway places much better, and this is not somewhere I'm coming back. I do however want to point out a few positive aspects: location, extremely quick water refills, waitresses wear lovely Chinese dresses and the process of settling the bill was surprisingly smooth and easy. read more