hiatus!

Due to a impending weekend away in Shrewsbury things have been a bit quiet on the eating out front, although the weekend promises to defintely make up for it. Planning on visiting as many as the 69 real ale pubs that Shrewsbury allegedly homes, so the other half will definitely be in his liquid heaven.

And looking at all the Shrewsbury websites they're not particularly short on restaurants, due to budget constraints we can't go for the super fantastic sounding ones, but planning on eating at The Golden Cross Hotel http://www.goldencrosshotel.co.uk/ which is all medieval and a bit gothic, and have a monthly changing menu from local ingredients, so it promising a fantastic early anniversary dinner - fingers crossed.

However, in the mean time we've been eating budget venues this week, mainly called home, but one is called Big Wok, it's a basic chinese buffet chain http://www.bigwok.co.uk/birmingham.htm that does a lunch for £4.99. This restaurant is in Birmingham's Chinese quarter which might be why it delivers so much more then a standard chinese buffet does. It has the ubiquitous english/chinese dishes - spare ribs, battered chicken, prawn toast, chicken wings, fried rice etc - but it also has steamed dumplings, fried won tons, steamed pak choi, chinese special of the day (which is only every stated in chinese, so it's a bit of a guessing game to try it) chinese soups (again only labelled in chinese) congee, and fish ball noodle soup. It's these chinese specials that make us visit on a regular basis at a lunch time, i feel the fish ball noodle soup is worth the £4.99 by itselft, everything else is a perk!

But is for the evening meal that it really perks up, then if offers a fresh teppanyaki section with tonnes of fresh ingredients to choose from before watching the team of chefs stir fry it in front of you; which you can follow with a selection of fresh sushi, or pay a £1 supplement for a selection of fresh sashimi, not including extended daily chinese specials; for all this extra this price rises to £8.99, but with the house wine at £8.90, it is a bargain night out. But beware it is not romantic, it is fundamentally a big canteen, but for the dedicated people watchers it is fantastic as you are normally right in the thick of tables filled with a wide range of people from the Chavs to the middle class, and every type of ethnic origin possible, a great big melting pot.