Johnny Wong's Oriental Restaurant
On 27 October 2007, I and 4 friends went to Johnny Wong's Oriental Restaurant in Erdington, in the suburb of Birmingham.
It is in the same premises where the mega Chinese supermarket Wing Yip stands, and there is also another restaurant called Wing Wah. I have heard that there used to be a restaurant that served Japanese food, but this one seems to have disappeared, possibly taken over by Johnny Wong's.
Johnny Wong serves Malay and Thai food, as well as Chinese. It does all-you-can eat system (but freshly cooked to order) as well as a la carte. But our objective was to try the hot pot.
This is the interior. It is not typicaly Chinese, and there are South-Eastern elements in it.
When we arrived at 2 o'clock in Saturday afternoon, there were only a couple of tables occupied, but we were warmly welcomed by a guy seemed like manager.
As we ordered the hot pot right away, we did not see the proper menu, but judging from the lunch menu they had on the table, the noodle dishes are from £5.50, £6.90 with seafood.
First to appear were these. Look at this small sieve. Naturally we got also chop sticks, but to eat smaller things in the hot pot, this sieve was very clever. On the other hand, there seems to be little idea that we want to eat the soup togather, as they did not give us ladle.
Next to come were these two dishes. One has a mountain of spinach, string mushrooms, and toufu, and the other one has two types of noodles with raw eggs. Noodles are to be eaten at the last.
String mushrooms are one of the most common types of cultivated mushrooms in Japan and 1 packet costs about 60p, but here in Britain, it is air-transported and costs about £1.50 a packet.
This is the hot pot. The soups are brought cold to the table and heated up on the portable stove. It takes barely 10 minutes to boil.
They have some types of soups, and we could choose up to two. We had tomyam and harbal, and the latter was specially good. But the two soups got mixed together while we were eating, as the food dropped in, the soups overflow to the opposite section.
We liked the harbal soup very much.
These are accompaniments. The green bits are fresh green chili, to the left is preserved meat paste, and behind is preserved shrimp paste. They tasted fine, but except for chili, they were pretty useless to us.
After some time of boiling the soups started to get bit salty. The waiters topped up the soups, but we should rather have asked to put some water in.
This is the main dish. At the front are the blue lip mussles, and in clock wise, fresh squid, deep-fried toufu, clams that I have never seen (delicious), meat balls, fish balls, beef stomach, and at the centre are king prawns and chicken.
We had also on separate plates a big fresh crab, sliced, and two entre fish (photo below).
When were were run out of the food, a waiter asked us if we wanted more; we asked some more meat, spinach and others, and he did.
The price is £13.95 / head. We ordered also Chinese tea, so it pushed it up to £15.15, so he paied £16 each. It might not seem cheap for a Chinese restaurant, but it was reasonable given the quality of of the ingredients.
Address:
Johnny Wong's Oriental Restaurant
8-12 Wing Yip Centre
278 Thimble Mill Lane,
Birmingham B7 5HD
Telephone: 0121 328 8288
Opening Hours: 11AM-11PM (Sunday 11AM-10PM), Open 7 days a week
