Viva Lewes Issue #143 August 2018

FOOD REVIEW
Castle Chinese Restaurant
Well worth remembering
It’s 9pm Sunday night,
five hours after the
start of our goodbyeto-Pipe-Passage
drinks
party, and four of us
are left standing… or
at least still in search of
food. And so we decide
to head to the Castle –
the new Chinese which
has replaced The Panda
Garden on the High
Street. It needs a review in these pages, anyway.
Sober enough to realise my recall faculties might
be impaired, I delegate reviewing responsibility
to Rebecca. We order starters and mains from
the à la carte menu, and listen to American David’s
idiosyncratic take on this and that.
My memories of the experience are now hazy:
I had some stupendous dim sum, some chicken
in a sauce that was ‘Malaysian’. Rebecca really
raved about her vegetarian chicken satay. I mean
really raved.
She’s a bit sheepish when I see her in the office
the next day. It appears her recall faculties were
somewhat impaired, too. So on the day before
deadline day, I opt to go for a solo lunch, to top
up the memory bank.
I’m the only one there, so the music gets turned
on for me. Chinese pop, I guess, the sort of thing
that might do well if there were an Asiavision
Song Contest. I ask the waitress where she’s
from: Mauritius. I order a Tsing Tao Chinese
beer, and two things from the £9.95 lunch menu:
Satay chicken on skewers, and Honey chilli pork,
with egg fried rice. I’m a sucker for dim sum,
so I also order some Siu Mai steamed pork and
prawn dumplings (£6),
which she tells me will
take ten minutes to
prepare. I take this as a
good sign.
Eating on your own is
a much easier experience
now mobile
phones are what they
are. I’ve always found a
newspaper – or a book –
too big for a restaurant
table. You’re less alone, somehow, with a phone.
I decide to see what’s going on in real-life China.
A vaping co-pilot, it seems, caused an Air China
flight to plummet 6,500 feet, but no one was
hurt. Back in the Castle, the dim sum are excellent,
the satay chicken is tasty, with the meat
cooked just right.
I ask for chopsticks. The waitress lets out an
embarrassed giggle when I take a picture of my
neatly presented main course. The rice comes in
a bowl-sized dome. The sticky sauce takes up its
own half of the plate without encroaching on the
other. You can taste it’s been made with honey,
rather than sugar. I enjoy every mouthful.
And so the Panda Garden is gone. The panda
is no more. But I’ve already eaten in the Castle
more times in the last week than I went to its
predecessor in the last ten years. And I can recommend
it as a place to eat off the à la carte in
a rowdy group (I checked the menu, what I had
first time round was a Malaysian chicken curry),
or go for a quiet lunch: you could even just get a
bowl of noodles, from £6. Alex Leith
Take-away available, too. 01273 473 235
castlechinese.co.uk
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