After seeing a set of raving reviews, I couldn’t resist making a reservation at China Tang any longer, especially when a friend suggested we meet there for lunch. Monkstown's China Tang is the namesake of the Chinese restaurant at The Dorchester in London, but has no connection to it. Inside, you'll find the fanciness of London's Yauatcha and Dublin's China Sichuan combined. It's a spacious room with intricate murals covering two of the walls.

The menu includes photographs as if it were a cookbook. Pride of place seems to have gone to the peking duck, which is priced at €88, and requires to be ordered in advance.

We decided to get other bits for the sake of variety, starting with the ha gou crystal prawn dumplings. "Crystal", when associated with dimsum, implies a transparent (or at the very least translucent) covering, going by a recent, excellent meal at Ling Ling at the Mandarin Oriental in Marrakech. The ones here, however, have an opaque covering and are not special in any way. They blew me away neither in terms of presentation nor taste. 

From among the mains, the deep-fried diced chicken with Sichuan dried chillies was better than the stir-fried king scallops and asparagus with XO sauce. The chicken pieces came hidden among the dried chillies and tasted strongly of Sichuan pepper. They were greasy, but not so greasy that they were inedible, and had other crunchy bits among them that seemed to be deep-fried batter in the form of little twists. We ate the dish crunching audibly.

The scallops were the biggest disappointment: fat, but lacking juiciness. The asparagus added nothing to the dish and, along with the scallops, tasted only of soy sauce rather than the punch a good XO sauce carries. Overall, the dish lacked flavour and seemed like it missed the opportunity to be the showstopper it could have been. It felt like the entire dish was an afterthought and not enough care had gone into conceptualising or preparing it.

After our meal, I wondered whether we had ordered badly or it was just the case that the food at China Tang is underwhelming. The restaurant and its menu are reminiscent of other Chinese restaurants across the globe, but fail to match up to them. Also considering that it shares its name with one of London’s Chinese food institutions, expectations were set high, despite knowing that the two have nothing in common except for the name. In this case, London takes the cake, leaving Dublin to explain why it borrowed the name and then didn’t bother trying to live up to it.