Telefono: +34966889612
Indirizzo: Avda Azorin, 2, 03509, Finestrat, Spain
Città: Finestrat
Menu Piatti: 8
Recensioni: 11006
"Sometimes a name is an accurate reflection of what it labels. Other times its a load of crock. REAL WOK Exotic Restaurant falls into the latter and as a name it is an malicious misdescription. Neither was the chef cooking with a wok in the open kitchen which sat unused instead like unwanted ornaments and everything about restaurant is about as exotic as a trip to a Costa Blanca car showroom. The offering purports to be Chinese, Japanese, and Asian food. However I would say this is heavily filtered through Valencian tastebuds to the point of being almost assimilated. This isn’t fusion, its homogenised. The restaurant is sited halfway down a thin finger like strip of land that reaches down from the beautiful old town of Finestrat in the interior to the gaudy seaside brutalism of La Cala de Finestrat on the coast. However this place is in limbo; a soulless netherworld between neither place reachable for most people only by car. It is a converted industrial unit sat between other industrial units on an industrial estate. There’s nothing pretty about it, unless cheaply built steel and glass warehouses are your thing. The cavernous interior stores tables arranged school canteen style, which remained half empty on a Thursday evening. We arrived at 8ish and the cavernous interior appeared half lit which it remained as the sun disappeared into the night. I don’t know if the intention was to create a “low vision” themed restaurant. Low lighting might work in a cosy cāntīng but here it just felt like Scroogian bah humbug miserliness. So this is all you can eat buffet dining at 16.95€ a head. I’ve had fantastic Chinese buffets at other restaurants before, so I kept my mind open. Everyone in my dining party had hot and sour soup to start. There was no heat in the spice at all. This was a theme that was to remain throughout the evening. I then had sushi which was to remain the most delicious offering on the entire menu. They had a variety of futo maki and American sushi rolls and they all tasted fresh. Second round I went for a selection of pre cooked starters. Tempura onion, ribs, pork meatball. They all had the same oily taste and all tasted of the same stale oil. There was no spice. Even trying to correct this with the chilli paste, it all still tasted the same. The noodles I spooned gingerly on the side tasted…bland. In my experience, traditional Spanish dishes do not like heat in their spices. Pimiento negro and milder varieties of Chillies, like the Padron, are often as hot as it gets. As the restaurant filled up seemingly with local families taking advantage of the huge quantities of food available, it became obvious that tourists with discerning tastebuds or expectations of proper Chinese food were not the primary market. It was nice to have the option of chopsticks, although we were the only table we saw using them. Trying to make my starters further palatable, the sweet and sour dipping sauce I added tasted 80% diluted. It was this or plum sauce only that were available. The chun bing; crispy duck pancakes, were okay, but the pancake batter was too thin and kept falling apart on me. The bain maries were regularly topped up by the staff whose demeanour varied between somewhat amiable to slightly indifferent. For the main I went up to the raw counter with its impressive seafood selection and meats. I grabbed an aromatic selection of raw veg to accompany my fillet of salmon and I went up to the chef behind the counter who was cooking everything on a grill plate. Asking for any of the five available sauces displayed on four foot tall posters upon the wall above the serving hatch was met with a “no”. Asking him to cook the fish with spices was met with a “no”. Apart from the dramatic sprinkling of black pepper and copious amounts of salt, and lashings of olive oil, all applied equally to every dish by every customer that was the only flavour available. So essentially REAL WOK is a Valeciana parrilla grill masquerading with “Asian esque” starters. To top it off the gents toilets were grim and in desperate need of a deep clean. If I’d gone in there when we first arrived, I would have turned round and refused to eat in the restaurant."
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