I celebrate Chinese New Year with a feast from Leicester's Oodles Wok

The meal, with prawn crackers, dumplings, torpedo prawns and a Coke, plus Deliveroo fees, came to £21.59
-Credit:Reach Publishing Services Limited


The Year of the Snake is here and I decided to mark Chinese New Year with a big, spicy feast from Oodles Wok. The choice of restaurant was made by taking a look at Trip Advisor to see which Chinese restaurant in Leicester was top-rated.

I was in the mood for something great. It was a cold, drizzly Tuesday and I didn't want to be eating rubbish.

The Oodles Wok in Granby Street, Leicester city centre, was the clear favourite, with a rating of 4.5 out of 5 based on 366 reviews. And - as I should have probably already known - Oodles is actually a Leicester company, started here in 2010 and now having more than 50 branches, including one in Dubai.

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I ordered a big paper sack full of food via Deliveroo and waited. It took a while being cooked, which was reassuring because they obviously weren't just microwaving it. By the time a moped finally pulled up outside my house I was starving.

Like every time I do a food review, I intended to just nibble at things and probably leave about half of it. There's nothing worse than sitting at a computer trying to write about food when you're so bloated you never want to think about food or eat any of it ever again.

But I was unsuccessful. It was all too good. It wasn't perfect but the main big box of food - Oodles Crispy Chicken Box, was full of spice and sweetness, textures and flavours. I couldn't put my fork down (no, I can't use chopsticks).

For starters, I chose three treats from the menu. First were the prawn crackers, which came in a small crisp packet and were okay but nothing special and I felt like they could have fried some to order instead.

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There is an Oodles in Granby Street and another Leicester branch on Evington Road -Credit:Google

Next were five torpedo prawns, which were coated in a brilliantly light and crunchy batter but had a bit of a weird artificial taste to them. But they also came with some chili sauce and once they'd been dunked they were delicious.

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Then there were some fried dumplings, which were nice enough but tasted a bit more like Indian food than Chinese food to me. They had a herby, aromatic flavour and the insides were a sort of green paste like a vegetarian samosa.

I've had far better dumplings from Chinese restaurants in the past but these ones were perfectly okay and went well with the chili sauce.

Lastly, there was the main box - a dense cube of tastiness including lots of chicken, egg fried rice, udon noodles, schezwan sauce, peppers, onion, carrots, beansprouts and lots more, including a nice sprinkling of sesame seeds.

The chicken was good but it was also the least impressive part of it. What was delicious was the sauce - hot and tangy, sweet and thirst-quenching - and that great combination of texture you get with a mix of quality fried rice and some chubby noodles.

I tried to warn myself not to eat too much but I didn't listen. It was so good. I just kept shovelling it in because it was irresistible.

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If, due to some Deliveroo algorithm mix-up, the same order of food had arrived 10 minutes after I'd finished, I really wouldn't want to have eaten it. But I would have.

Our rating: 4/5

Official food hygiene rating: 5/5

Oodles Wok did not know we would be doing a review and we paid for our food.