The Red Panda

We frequent the Great Victoria St Belfast branch quite often but I was quite disappointed with the flavours of the food here in Antrim and I didn’t expect the take away to be poor. Two of us had the salt & chilli king prawn, which also had lightly fried onions and green peppers at near £15 for two. I much prefer red peppers. Red peppers are now the same price wholesale and they are much tastier and sweeter than green peppers. Chinese restauranteurs please take note, and think about starting to serve crunchy red pepper. Now as I ordered my view was that the salt & chilli king prawn dish from here should have been as good as, if not far better than, the equivalent served by Yangtze Chinese Castlecourt Belfast and the annoying fact is it was simply nowhere near as good yet here it’s much more expensive. Red Panda chefs should visit and see how to do it properly: the Yangtze batter is light and it is superb, this one is cloying. The Yangtze dish has fresh sliced red chilli and red peppers in it, not in the Red Panda one. (The food in the Red Panda branch in Gt Victoria Street Belfast is also far better.) One of us had the salt & chilli pork with fried rice and declared it pretty good. The fried rice was perfectly ok but the crispy seaweed was dreadful, it was not crispy, it was not even close, and it was lousy tasting too even with the dry cooked salt & pepper topping. Had I been sitting — in rather than a take out I would not have hesitated in sending it back to the kitchen. As if this wasn’t bad enough it was well over — priced for the mean size portion. The starters are at least thirty pence over priced, rising to a pound over priced for the duck parcels and wanton starters. Each main is about fifty pence over priced, going close to Rip Off. The speed of take away service was alright and the server was pleasant and courteous. Two plus points though: if you buy two mains you have a choice of free starter — most of which are the cheaper end except for the prawn toast and the small pack of free prawn crackers are good quality. I think it would be better to reduce the menu prices and let customers choose to buy a starter should they wish.

The worst meal I have had ever!
The food was bland, tasteless and obviously prepared several days previously.
The cleanliness was very poor. The suspended light above our table had a thick covering of dust and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time.
The waitress obviously did not want to be there and was downright rude and unhelpful.
To top it all off, it was extremely expensive. Over £36 for 2 main courses, 1 kids meal, and 2 cokes (which were flat and tasted strange).
Not a good experience at all. I will never be back.

I didn’t rate this place very highly, it’s a lovely looking place but the food felt cheap and pre-​prepared and not worth what I was paying