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This week Yvonne and The Scouser decided to get a takeaway from Fair View Chinese in Higher Walton instead of eating out. I’d have preferred something healthier because I’d had Chinese the day before and was still feeling guilty about it. I know that some of the options can be less unhealthy than others, but plain boiled rice is the culinary equivalent of The Nothing in The Neverending Story and I’m not prepared to lose my horse to some bland rice.
There’s always the obligatory omelette on the menu, under the English Food option… but no thank you and also, I have never in my life heard an English person say, ‘You know what? I could murder an omelette, but despite having eggs in my fridge and being able to cook one in about three minutes, I want to pay £7.50 for it and enjoy it ten minutes after it’s cooked when it will have achieved maximum lukewarm, rubbery perfection’. I don’t even order an omelette to eat in a restaurant because I’m not letting the chef off with sending out food that even I could competently cook for myself. Toast and baked potatoes are also on that admittedly quite embarrassingly short list.
Yvonne gave me a final nudge by telling me that Fair View do a Thai green curry that Dry Tony rates highly. I have never had an authentic Thai meal from a Chinese takeaway and I’m too jaded and disillusioned to truly believe that it might really happen but I let myself hope, just a little bit, and hopped on the Orient Express for the second night on a run.
As authentic Thai food goes it was a train wreck, and I still haven’t had an authentic Thai meal from a Chinese takeaway. To be fair the green curry was indeed green and looked like it had some sort of creaminess to it, but there wasn’t a discernible taste of coconut, fish sauce, lime leaves or coriander, and unlike the real deal, it wasn’t identifiable by fragrance alone. On the upside it tasted alright, and there was plenty of chicken, making it good value for £6.70. It was padded out with quite a lot of onions so not recommended for those with onion fear, but decent for the rest of us.
We ordered two portions of chips to share with it so maybe I didn’t deserve an authentic Thai curry. I had no regrets, however, because they were the lovely, traditional chippy type chips that seem to be slowly dying out and getting replaced by frozen French fries in takeaways, and there were loads of them.
Yvonne had salt and pepper crispy beef, which lived up to at least half of the deal. It looked like someone had emptied a family pack of Nik Naks into a takeaway container and, whilst it was definitely crispy, the beef that was inside was gossamer thin, with the batter doing the same thing for the beef that 15 layers of wallpaper does for the original plaster in a 1930s semi-detached. It also tasted of fish, presumably after sharing an oily hot tub with the fish and a diverse cross-section of other proteins in a joyful celebration of fried togetherness. A takeaway cardinal sin.
The Scouser had ordered Kung Po chicken with strictly no vegetables. He’s not allergic to them, just loathes them and their fruity cousins to the point of gipping if he gets a whiff of shrubbery. Unfortunately, there was a hodgepodge of carrots, chilli peppers, onions, peas and some stuff that looked like pineapple but didn’t taste like it, all chopped up into pieces small enough to latch onto the underbelly of an unsuspecting piece of fried chicken and sneak into his mouth for the craic.
Yvonne called the takeaway and spoke to a member of staff who said she hadn’t specified no veg in the Kung Po, just the noodles. This wasn’t true as The Scouser makes a point of hovering next to whomever is ordering the takeaway, repeating ‘tell them no vegetables’ throughout the entire phone call until we say it, which isn’t distracting at all.
A couple of pieces of chicken later the stress of life living under the Onion of Damocles broke him. He gave up on the Kung Po and just ate the plain noodles, which he thought were ‘alright’. It was hard to watch such a tragedy unfold, but also quite satisfying as I didn’t want a Chinese in the first place, so feel free to send him your thoughts and pears.
It worked well for me as I was able to abandon the green curry and eat his Kung Po, which turned out to be the nicest dish out of all of them. It was very similar to a generic takeaway sweet and sour but with the addition of a sprinkle of chilli and some cashew nuts. Not life changing, but tasty enough.
We also discovered some prawn crackers in the bag and six mini spring rolls. They were a bit mushy inside so I wouldn’t want them again, but they were a nice surprise.
I wouldn’t order any of that evening’s main courses again but the chips were excellent so I’d give it another go and order a fish instead of the Chinese options.
My meal that evening wasn’t the best, but that was mostly because I’d hoped for a proper Thai green curry. Nowadays, Preston has such a diverse range of restaurants serving authentic cuisine from countries all over the world that there is way less suspicion of new flavours and textures than there was when eateries that served non-traditional English food started popping up in the UK.
The items that we received from Fair View reminded me of the takeaways that we’d have in the 70s. Not bad, but tasting overwhelmingly of sugar, or salt, with little complexity. Places like Tang in Ashton are proof that authenticity is a big draw.
Fair View provides big portions for the money, so if you’re on a budget and treating your family there’s a lot to go around. Yvonne and Tony have enjoyed their previous takeaways from Fair View and I’d heard others recommend it, so perhaps we caught them on a bad day, But as far as Thai food goes, I’ll give up on the Chinese takeaways and stick to getting them from Thai restaurants such as Khao Thai Eatery on Church Street, or Thai Ends in Ashton.
Have you ever had a good Thai meal from a Chinese eatery? Let us know in the comments.
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