Silk Road

Order led takeaway. The flavour of the food has changed; it's practically tasteless. The portions have also shrunk; there's hardly any meat left.

Add my five stars to the pile - this place is always busy and with good reason. Go with a group of friends (book if it's the weekend or a large group) and order several dishes to share. It's not your typical msg-laden trashy Chinese - Silk Road serves a small menu of northern and some Sichuan style dishes and dumplings not seen anywhere else in the area. Big Plate Chicken is a huge sharing dish of tender chicken pieces, huge lasagne-sized hand pulled noodles, vegetables and potatoes in a mild Sichuan spiced broth. The lamb skewers are spicy barbecued heaven, and the dumplings are fresh and tasty. Make sure you try the vegetable dishes. Vinegar cabbage - napa leaves with a thick dressing of rice vinegar and mild chilies - sounds weird but is perfect to cut through the spicy meat dishes.

Really delicious and authentic Chinese food. Every dish we ordered was fantastic. It's BYOB with a corkage cost or you can order lagers. It's very reasonably priced. We were a table of 9 and the bill came to £23 per head, and we had a feast. Only criticism is it's very loud in there, they need to add some soft furnishings or something to dampen the noise.

Very disappointing. I ordered a takeaway on the recommendation of a friend: lamb shish skewers, pork and celery dumplings, and the cucumber salad. Despite paying for priority delivery, the food arrived cold. Since the app. was accurately updating the ride (16 minutes) I assume it was sat about in the restaurant long enough to cool down The dumplings were tepid, bland, undetectable celery. There was no dipping sauce included, which surprised me: is it really the entire dish if there’s no dipping sauce? The lamb was cold and required thorough reheating. It did carry some flavours, but the profile was salty and lacked complexity. Nearly every other chunk was pure fat. Some fat on some of the chunks, sure, but this was taking the piss. The cucumber salad was room temperature, despite it being a cold night. The dressing was boring but salty. The salt is meant to be a part of the dish, not the central note! I might risk eating in if in the area, but I’ll not bother with delivery in future. Still hunting for a decent Chinese somewhere in the Brixton area.