Lifestyle: Restaurant review – Wing Wah, Birmingham
I ALWAYS look forward to my annual visit to Wing Wah, the restaurant element of the Wing Yip complex in Birmingham’s Nechells, to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
Usually I enjoy the food so much that I vow to not let 12 months go by before my next visit but invariably that’s what happens.
Which is a real shame because food of this quality deserves to be eaten on a more regular basis.
Not that the restaurant seems to be struggling. When I visited on a Friday lunchtime recently – as part of a group of local journalists – Wing Wah was doing a brisk trade.
Like many Chinese restaurants these days a good part of its offering is based around a buffet and as a group we were served with a number of dishes to share.
Many of them were familiar – spare ribs, spring rolls etc – but they were all cooked to perfection so familiarity most certainly didn’t breed contempt.
But it was the dishes I was less familiar with that really caught my eye and tickled my taste buds. These included seafood yuk sung – a delicious variation on a familiar theme – and cuttlefish ‘cake, a chunky and flavoursome fish cooked with spices and garlic and served with Chinese broccoli.
In another twist that worked well, sweet and sour pork was served with pieces of strawberry instead of the more traditional pineapple.
The dishes just kept coming. I remember extremely enjoyable beef and chicken-based dishes before – like Roberto Duran, finally defeated in that famous fight against Sugar Ray Leonard – I had to raise my hand and say ‘no mas’.
We were celebrating the start of the Year of the Horse (the ‘years’ come around every 12 years, if that makes sense) and if you were born in 1990, 1978, 1966 etc you are apparently determined and confident.
Well I’m determined that I will be visiting Wing Wah before next January. Am I confident it will happen? Ask me in six months’ time.
Kung Hei Fat Choi (Happy New Year).
