A trip to Dragon Castle in Elephant is a joyfully kitschy experience as it feels and smells like a genuine mega restaurant in Beijing with its sad goldfish, plastic plants, rude service, and chairs/tables that look as if they were nicked from a conference centre in Solihul. Not to mention Christmas lights in September. There is an updated menu since our visit in 2023 with sections for set meals, a la carte and dim sum options, so that was our flimsy excuse for a revisit.

For this meal we were joined by new Finance Director Amy. She opted for the double cooked pork belly with black bean sauce and egg Fried rice. The pork dish was denoted on the menu with two chillies and was as spicy as hoped. The pork itself was thin strips that worked well with the vegetables and spicy sauce, an interesting element of which was a mushroom fungus. This was an oily dish so Amy suggested using  a napkin to ‘cover your essentials’. Exactly where on the anatomy those essentials can be located remains unclear.

Your scribe suggested getting a range of dishes to fully sample the breadth of food on offer at Dragon Castle. This was met with what we now understand to be Amy’s ‘death stare’, so we opted for the more parsimonious tofu and prawn salad. This was a light and flavourful protein packed dish augmented by ginger, garlic, spring onions, and coriander with s savoury, soy based sauce. Your scribe also ordered rice but as they are so big you really need to order just one.

To be frank Dragon Castle is not a great deal better than most Chinese takeaways but its loads of fun and gets you out of the house. With a beer and wine the bill was just over £50. At the end of the meal we had to bid a sad adieu to the plastic plants, goldfish and Solihul influenced dining furniture to be dispensed into the unmitigated reality that is…… Walworth Road.