We’ve made a bit of a habit of purchasing coupons for meals last year, but we don’t often purchase coupons for chinese food as we have plenty of favourite chinese restuarants already which are cheap and cheerful. And to be honest, having grown up with Chinese food, it’s a little boring most of the time 😉 The scoopon deal for New China Restaurant is quite different though, offering an all-you-can eat fare, with a selection of entree and main dishes. Now we’ve had all you can eat Japanese, sushi, Korean and everything, but never Chinese, so we were quite interested to see how it worked out!

The restaurant is quite empty on the night we visit, with one three or so table there, most with scoopons also. The service is friendly, and we are told that for this deal, we must all start with an entree each, followed by as many mains as we want but that every two main dishes comes with either fried or boiled rice.

Of course, we go for the fried entrees- spirng rolls and fried wontons. The spring rolls are tiny bite-sized pieces, and although we’re not the biggest fans of spring rolls, we do enjoy them. The fried wontons have obviously been left in the fryer for too long, being dark brown instead of golden and thus rather hard. We do order them again later in the meal, after seeing our neighbour’s wontons looking quite good, and this time they were not over-fried but weren’t the best wontons we’ve had.

The other two entree options are dumplings in clear soup (i.e. short soup) or in spicy soup, which gets me quite excited as dumplings in spicy soup is one of my favourite Asian dishes. The slippery soft dumplings are quite delicious, though it didn’t hold the sauce too well  and I could easily have finished the whole bowl by myself. I was a little disappointed with the sauce itself as it wasn’t like the ones I was used to which are a tad more tingly than spicy and have a greater depth of flavour. The sauce in this version was rather like the chinese chilli sauce which I usually have with noodles and whatnot, being quite oily, though I did enjoy quite enjoy this.

The mains followed quickly after the entrees, first off with the fried duck, something we rarely order at Chinese restaurants, as we tend to prefer our duck roasted. This duck is done amazingly though, with an incredibly crispy skin, and is easily our favourite dish for the night. Whilst most fried ducks I’ve had before merely have the texture of duck, and taste otherwise like chicken, the meat of this one has a great depth of flavour and strong duck taste you’d find in roast duck.

We had high hopes for this fried rice as its deep dark colour made it look quite tasty. Unfortunately, the colour probably only comes from the use of dark soy, as rice itself was quite bland, tasting much more like plain rice than fried. Interestingly, the grains used for the rice were rather small and short in comparison to the usual Asian rice, so it had an interesting mouth feel……I wonder what kind of rice they use?