The Jade Wok

I go here quite a lot for lunch with friends from work. The restaurant is always clean and well presented, and the staff are always friendly and helpful.
While I’ve only chosen from the lunch menu, the food is always delicious and good value. I recommend the salt & pepper chicken wings to start followed by the szechuan beef with fried rice. It’s got quite a kick to it, but it’s so tasty! The ribs and spring rolls are also fantastic by the way.
The only problem is that it’s located outside the main town centre on a parade of shops with a few other restaurants, so it can be a bit dead during the day which leads to a total lack of atmosphere, and the same CD seems to be playing every day with quite dull middle of the road country/​pop music.

Although it doesn’t look like all that much from the outside, Jade Wok is a surprisingly elegant (my definition of elegance here being that they fold their napkins into pretty patterns — please don’t judge me) Chinese restaurant. My fellow reviewer has pointed at the clinical atmosphere of the restaurant, and whilst I see where he’s coming from, I felt it was more a case of clean, minimalist style (not often found in Chinese eateries) than a negative ambience. The menu is absolutely huge, even bigger than your usual Chinese takeaway offering, which is saying something, and it can feel slightly intimating being faced with such a wide selection (although you’d be hard pressed to name a Chinese dish that they don’t serve!). One of my personal attractions to Jade Wok is the fact that they do a buffet (Sundays– Thursdays, 6 – 11, for £14.90 per person, or Sundays 12 – 6 for £11.90 per person) with a similarly gigantic selection, and you can easily fill up three times over before having to eat anything twice.

This very popular Chinese offers a tremendously diverse menu in comparison with your average takeaway and offers a pleasant culinary experience whether you’re eating in or taking away. As with most Chinese restaurants, soothing flute instrumentals of popular songs are played at a low volume for customers and the tables inside are decorated with red and white tablecloths and laid out with both chopsticks and knives and forks. The menu offers all the usual curries, stir fries and starters you’d expect, but then exceeds expectations with its diverse selection of seafood dishes, all of which sound very appetising, but are sadly quite pricey.
Pale, click-​and-​fit wooden floors and white wallpapered walls give the restaurant a sort of clinical feeling and the ambience inside definitely isn’t quite up to scratch, but the staff are friendly and relaxed (they don’t try to rush you out of your seat) and in my experience, the food is always of a good standard.