Eastern Promise

I usually don't like to try new food, so instead of going far, I decided to eat at my local restaurant. I started with the chicken satay skewers, but they were not to my liking as they were fried instead of being served in sauce. The battered mini spring rolls were delicious with BBQ sauce. The chicken in black bean sauce was flavorful and perfectly cooked, tender and juicy. The satay chicken had the same great taste. The chips were nicely salted and the BBQ sauce was thick and flavorful. Overall, the food was of good quality at a reasonable price. The young lady server was very friendly as well. I can imagine dining in would be a pleasant experience.

We had been wanting to try this takeout restaurant for a while, so we decided to treat ourselves at the end of a day out. My husband played it safe by ordering his favorite Chinese dish, the chef's special fu yung. We picked up our food and drove home, but unfortunately, the fu yung was dry, flavorless, and lacked the usual variety of meats and prawns that are typically included in a special dish. My husband had to add some sweet and sour sauce to make it more edible. Luckily, my vegetable chow mein was relatively tasty, although it was very salty. Overall, only one of us enjoyed our meal.

This Chinese restaurant served the most horrendous food I have ever tasted! We ordered Singapore rice noodles, chili ribs, chicken satay, and sesame prawn toast. The noodles were extremely dry, with only a few bits shoved to the side of the container. The ribs were covered in a strange jam-like sauce, with no hint of chili flavor. The only redeeming dish was the sesame prawn toast, which was edible. The satay was overcooked and had a hard exterior, with a texture similar to mattress foam on the inside. Overall, I would not recommend this restaurant to anyone. It was a waste of money and truly shocking.

I really didn't want to writethis review, but I have tried to phone, tried to email and tried to contact discreetly in every way I can. They're not interested. I really wanted to give my feedback discreetly to give them a chance but they won’t come to the phone (3 times over 2 days) won’t give me an email address and gave me a bogus mobile number to text. My message to the Facebook page was ignored. We’ve been buying our Chinese food from the Eastern Promise for years and we collected a takeaway from Saturday night. It seems you have made some changes and we were rather disappointed, which is a shame. So, here we go: Salt Pepper King Prawns – overcooked, unseasoned and tasteless bullets in armoured batter; Lemon Chicken – bitter and unsweetened, overcooked and dry; Crispy Chili Beef – way too much vinegar in the sauce, chewy and no suggestion of crispiness; Yung Chow Fried Rice – dry and tasteless; Chicken Chow Mien – chicken overcooked, virtually no sauce, altogether dry and inedible; Sesame Prawn Toast – very good; Egg Fried Rice – very good. None of the food seemed to be seasoned properly and the typical Chinese seasonings (garlic, ginger, chilli, 5-spice) were conspicuous by their total absence. Also, spending £37 with you would normally get a complimentary portion of prawn crackers – not this time though. As you can see, this was not the experience we were hoping for and I am someone who very rarely complains. What is even more worrying is the total lack of interest in getting some feedback discreetly – you just don’t seem to care, so I’ve had to create a Tripadvisor account just to let you know!

Keen to see if the “Eastern Promise” in Grampound remained as good as it had been over a decade ago, we booked in for a Saturday evening meal for two. It was truly awful. This was on a Saturday evening, midway between Christmas and New Year and we were the only customers in this dreadful restaurant (see photograph). Service was appalling, the ‘waiter’ was unable to provide us with either a blackcurrant and soda or a lager shandy “We don’t stock blackcurrant and soda or shandy.” (us): ‘Do you have lager and lemonade?’ “Why yes.” (us): ‘Well that’s what you mix together to make a shandy.’ We chose the set menu for two people, but what arrived bore scant resemblance to that depicted on the menu. The first part of the starter should have been a delicious, hot, crispy duck. It was neither delicious, hot nor crispy. It was cold, mushy and felt as if it had been frozen, defrosted, heated, refrozen and reheated. The second part of the starter was even worse, so much so that at this point we gave up, paid for the appalling food already served and left. To add insult to injury, the ‘waiter’ and manager then tried to bill us for the cost of the entire meal. Please, please, please if you are near to the “Eastern Promise” in Grampound and feeling hungry drive straight past and eat anywhere else. It was the worst dining experience we’ve ever had. Truly abysmal.