How is it that, despite Chinese or Thai being my go-to vegetarian or vegan cuisine when cooking at home, it's so difficult to track down a good vegetarian meal at one of the many Chinese or Thai restaurants in Oxford? My favourites - My Sichuan, Chiang Mai, Sojo - all have a serious meat focus, with a few fish dishes thrown in. Even the vegetable side dishes are cooked with meat.
So, when I needed to entertain some veggie friends for a few days, I put out a call on Twitter for suggestions. One of the ideas that came back was the Pink Giraffe - a venue which I had always avoided on the grounds of its pale pink exterior and impossible-to-use website. But desperate times call for desperate measures, so off we went on Saturday night.
The restaurant is much smaller on the inside than I had expected, with tables placed very close together and little space for waiting staff to move between. Combined with the attractiveness of their all-you-can-eat-for-£15 deal to those falling out of the many local pubs, it was absolutely packed; this is one place you'd definitely need to book in advance to get into.
We started with a dish we'd been hugely looking forward to, the mock crispy duck. My partner is normally a crispy duck fiend, so this was going to have to be good. The tofu was actually crispy on the outside (I'm still bewildered as to how they achieved this), and although slightly lacking in "duck" flavour, once smothered in hoisin sauce, wrapped in pancakes and topped with spring onions and cucumber, it was barely discernible from the real thing. We also had some mock prawn crackers which were delicious and utterly indistinguishable from those you'd get anywhere else, and some crispy seaweed, which was somewhat underseasoned.
I stole a taste of the mock crispy beef in Sichuan sauce from someone elses plate, and was immediately jealous: it was better than any time I've had the real version. Instead of chewy overcooked strings of elastic in the middle of the crisp coating, there were just crunchy morsels, smothered in a hot sweet sauce.
Two of us ordered dishes "Pink Giraffe" style, which meant traditional Thai stir-fry style. They had a well-balanced mix of hot, sour, salty, and sweet flavours, together with with green beans and basil. The latter was a little lacking, compared to the excellent version at Angrid Thai, but was otherwise fantastic, both in the original bean curd and the mock pork versions. It's worth saying, though, that one of these dishes originally arrived as real beef, despite the waitress checking the order with us twice. It was replaced very quickly with the correct version, but it's definitely worth checking when dishes arrive that they are what you ordered: the kitchen are clearly capable of making mistakes.
The only non-vegetarian in the group ordered the squid in black pepper sauce, and noted that the squid was cooked perfectly, and came in a spicy and slightly smoky sauce, so they clearly know what they're doing with the "normal" menu, too. We drank a respectable bottle of rose wine(or maybe two of them); the rest of the wine list looked unexceptional, but suitable for a venue where the food is going to obliterate the taste of most wine. Service throughout was friendly, although a little inefficient towards the end, taking quite some time to bring us a bill.
No comments:
Post a Comment