"The Sanbao Chinese Kitchen is quick, flavoursome and cheap – especially at lunchtime. The lunch special is a bargain £6.50, which includes drink (choices include fruit juices and Chinese tea), starter and main course with rice. You pay £7.50 for some of the premium choices. The only problem is, everything pitches up together. While I was delighted to receive my mushroom consommé – good flavour, slightly gloopy – almost immediately after ordering, I was dismayed to be brought my main course barely 20 seconds later. The sweet and sour chicken dish with pineapple was good, with a rich red citrusy sauce and mound of rice, but it was so hard on the heels of the starter that it was difficult to juggle everything. It’s less of problem if you order, say, a spring roll starter, which can be incorporated into the meal. Usually, the mushroom soup is £3.80, the sweet and sour chicken £7.50, the rice £1.50, the tea £1.50… so you get £14.30 worth of food and drink for your £6.50. And it has to be £6.50 as the restaurant is one in a line of eateries fiercely competing for Hammersmith’s lunchtime trade. The lunch choice is excellent, from sea spicy aubergine and pork with rice to mixed seafood with rice. The dishes are all wok-cooked, and you can hear the cooking and kitchen babble. Service is slick and swift – too swift in some cases! But this is superb value, tasty fresh-cooked food and an ideal hot lunch."
