Some of the Worst Chinese I’ve Ever Had

As I noted before, Ireland has this weird thing where the citizens there swear they don’t have their own cultural food. The blame, they say, lies with the English who did what they could to stomp out Irish culture. The dishes we tend to think of as Irish aren’t considered their cultural dishes (even if I did find plenty of places serving Irish stew, Irish Pie, Irish Breakfast, and even Corned Beef and Cabbage) and, at least the people over there that I talked to, say they don’t really think of any of that stuff as “uniquely Irish”.

Stranger still, when prompted for a dish that they would say really is uniquely Irish, what most tended to point to were “spice bags”. This is a dish popular across most of the country, a fast food item that blends chips (fries) with Chinese cuisine for something that reminded me, when I was told about it, of a walking taco. A bag of fries and toppings that you carry around and eat isn’t what I expected as a traditional Irish dish, but then I’m not Irish so who am I to judge.

I didn’t actually get around to trying a spice bag, and there’s a very specific reason for that: I was told, repeatedly, the best place to get this culinary concoction was at Xi’an Street Food, a chain of Chinese takeaway joints that was spread all across the city. I had already been to Xi’an earlier in the week that I was in Ireland, and that alone probably would have stopped me from getting a spice bag from the restaurant since my wife and I had agreed to only eat at each place we found once. But the even stronger reason why I didn’t get a spice bag from Xi’an Street Food despite the recommendations was because the food we’d already gotten from the place was awful. Quite simply put it was some of the worst Chinese food I’d ever had, practically inedible. And a place that can’t make good food from their own cuisine can’t be trusted, in my mind, with a weird fusion concoction, no matter what everyone around me was saying.

For our outing at Xi’an, my wife got a few trusty items that we figured no one could screw up (we were wrong). We ordered a plate of Pad Thai, their homestyle Spicy Chicken, Spring Rolls, and a dish of Dumplings. Of all of these items, most of which were bland, gross, and greasy, only the dumplings were at all good. I actually managed to finish that dish off, but the rest sat around for a few hours as we tried to decide if we wanted anymore, before we finally threw all of it out.

The Pad Thai was all wrong. Compositionally it looked okay, with chicken, carrots, string beans, and noodles all together along with a topping of crushed peanuts. But from the first bite we could tell something was off. The noodles were too big, too thick, and didn’t taste right. They were weirdly gummy, as if they’d been overcooked (maybe even more than once), and they lacked flavor. The whole dish, honestly, lacked flavor, with everything being overcooked, mushy, and bland. Normally when you hear about Irish food you don’t expect it to be bland (that’s English food that’s supposed to be bland), but this was a terribly bland, awful bowl of noodles.

The Spicy Chicken was somehow worse. Chicken, with bamboo shoots, peppers, and Asian mushrooms, shouldn’t be hard to screw up, and yet they did. Like the Pad Thai, this dish was overcooked and under-seasoned. It lacked any real flavor at all, including spice, and somehow managed to be blander than the sum of its parts. It’s almost like it had negative flavor, just being a steaming bowl of underflavored meat and veg. The only real flavor I got from the dish was grease, as it was practically swimming in it. And, to make matters worse the restaurant forgot to give me my rice, so the one thing that might have absorbed the greasy sauce and made things more palatable was missing.

The spring rolls were at least crunchy, but they were also bland. They tasted like dough, lacking any flavor to the protein or veggies within. If the Spicy Chicken sauce had been tasty I could have seen dipping the rolls in the sauce, but that wasn’t happening with the dish I got. The only thing that was decent was the dumplings, which were soggy but at least had flavor. They were very thick, steamed dumplings that, normally, I wouldn’t have rejected, but I was starving and these at least tasted like they were supposed to. They tasted like Asian dumplings. I ate them while I regretted everything else we got.

In the end this was a terrible experience, which is shocking not just because everyone we talked to suggested the place, but also because the restaurant was always packed. I’m not sure if we just somehow picked some of the worst things off their menu, or if the only thing they were good at was spice bags, but after the terrible experience we had, I wasn’t willing to go back and try. And it’s strange since we’d already had good Asian food in Dublin before, over at the Chili Club, so it’s not like bad Asian food is the norm there.

I don’t know why Xi’an Street Food’s goods were so bad, but I can guarantee you if I’m ever back in Ireland I’m not trying them again. The lure of spice bags isn’t enough to make me risk their awful, disgusting food again.