New World Restaurant

My first yum cha, and if my faith wasn’t renewed by the Golden Pagoda the next day, I would never eat Chinese food again in London.

Food

I can say without a doubt that this was the WORST YUM-CHA I HAVE EVER HAD IN MY LIFE. The food was so bad that I didn’t even bother trying everything, and I left things uneaten, which for me, is a cardinal sin.

Here’s a list of what’s wrong:

• bbq pork - rough and tasteless
• prawn dumplings - really hard and rough pastry, also dry
• pork dim sum - tasteless and dry
• beef rice paper roll - uncooked pink beef that we had to send back. We got some pork ones as replacement, but I didn’t even bother trying these. Nor the prawn ones we got.
• turnip cake - actually acceptable
• vegetable pork dumpling - same dry disgusting pastry and tasteless filling
• siu hin buns - dry, with absolutely no soup inside, and they didn’t give us any vinegar, so we had to ask for it, and then they only gave us some brown vinegar, not the proper ones.
• fried dumplings - the best out of the lot, but it’s still worst than anything I’ve tasted at yum cha.
• chicken rice - absolutely no taste whatsoever.
• egg tarts - they managed to do the pastry well, but the filling was a let down.

We ordered quite a few others as well, but I didn’t bother trying them. What was worst, they had actually RUN OUT of all these food we wanted, and it wasn’t even 1pm!! What kind of restaurant is this? What I didn’t get was, why was there a huge line of people waiting when we left at 1pm? Didn’t they know that this place is horrible?

Rating - 0

Atmosphere

The restaurant was almost full at 11:30am on a Saturday, which was a good sign. However, Westerners fill most of the table, and the biggest table they had was for 10 people, so we didn’t even all fit! Plus, they don’t have lazy Susans for any of the big table, very bad.

The décor is really dated, looks like a HK restaurant from 20 years ago. Really bad white paper tablecloth cover the table, the utensils have seen better days. The only thing that looks nice about the place is probably the outside, in that red and green “China” association.

Rating - 0.5

Service

Again, let down in this department. Nobody cleared our table or refilled our table for ages, we had to call them to get any service. The trolley ladies don’t even speak Chinese, and don’t want to give you food. I guess at least they’re not pushy…

Rating - 1

C-factor

It worked out to be £12 per head, but I wasn’t full at all. This was supposed to be one of the cheaper restaurants, but for this sort of food, I would actually prefer Maccas (says she who has not eaten at McDonalds for over 10 years)

Rating - 0

Brownie Points - 1.5

Info

1 Gerrard Place
London
W1D 5PA
Phone+44 (0) 7734 0396