Chinese restaurant review: I try a feast of fiery flavours

I used to have a favourite Chinese restaurant in Leicester many years ago but, unfortunately, it closed down after a raid by immigration. After that I had a new favourite on Evington Road but it was a long way to drive and I think it's gone now, anyway.

So I was interested to see what Deliveroo would recommend as the best-rated Chinese near me. The top scorers on Deliveroo included Spicy Style, which is just across from The Magazine in the city centre.

It had an "excellent" rating with 4.7 out of 5. I took a look on Google and it had a lower score - 3.9 out of 5.

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I ordered a load of food to see how I rated it. It came by bike and was packed up in a thin white plastic bag that was hardly able to take the weight of it all. Like all food that comes by bike across a city in throwaway containers it didn't look amazing when I opened it up but it smelled pretty great.

I started on the cheapest of the three dishes, which was the signature fried noodles, costing £9.50. It was addictive stuff.

Tasty, salty meat with a perfect amount of moistness provided by the fat and beansprouts, with two big unexpected prawns as well as everything else, including chicken and pork. It was hard to stop and move on.

Next up was the second-dearest dish, the sweet and sour vegetable mix, costing £11.90. It was still scalding hot. It was full of flavour but a bit repetitive and not very spicy.

It was made with a big variety of vegetables but few of them had anything like enough clout to be tasted over the sauce. It wasn't bad but it wasn't a dish you'd want to sit down and eat on its own, like the noodles had been.

Lastly, I tucked into the double-cooked pork with rice, costing £12.50. It came in a massive, round, see-through box and it looked like it was far too much rice with half an inch of other stuff plonked on top - I worried they'd got the ratios wrong.

But everything on the top layer was deliciously spicy and the ratio of rice to other bits was perfect. The rice diluted the spice to a tolerable amount.

By the time I'd had a few forkfuls I was feeling almost drunk with the heat. And the pork, cut like rashers of bacon, was delicious. If that's what double-cooked pork tastes like, they should cook it three times.

Verdict

Compared to other cuisines, Chinese food from any one restaurant, in its little plastic boxes, isn't massively different from any other, most of the time. I've never had really bad Chinese food and the really good stuff is always expensive.

But Spicy Style, while serving fairly simple food, get it right and each of the three containers were loaded with so much grub I decided to weigh them on my kitchen scales. After I'd eaten enough to fill me up there was still about a kilo and a half of food left, so it's pretty great value for money, too. 4/5