Bao Zi Inn: the house of Szechuan-flavoured muck

ow do people become food critics? For some it is the lucky combination that gets them the job: liking free meals and being friends with the editor. Issue in, issue out they churn out rambling nonsense but who cares: the content is there and the advertisers pay.

I don't have good referrers for my quest for good Chinese food in London. I don't yet know any Chinese people here. That is why I read what food critics write. Or, more correctly, I have just stopped doing that. Because many of them do not seem to know peanuts about food.

I just went to Bao Zi Inn, a Chinese eatery in Newport Court, Covent Garden, based on a review in Time Out. Granted, there are differences in opinions. But how can you praise to the skies veritable muck that, despite your insisting on the opposite, has just the names of the dishes to do with authentic Szechuan cuisine? While in London's Chinatown at best you can have forgettable meals, this one is several notches beyond that.

Despite Time Out's claim that Bao Zi Inn has brought about a culinary revolution, I witnessed all classic Chinatown fodder crimes:

1. stodgy noodles in flavourless broth;
   
2. snivel-like starch-based "gravy";
3. main ingredients pre-cooked in bulk in the morning;
   
4. dishes made of combinations of 2 and 3.
   

Our spinach salad was made well in advance and had a stale taste of overmature vinaigrette. It also contained a handful of peanuts boiled into perfect tastelessness - nice touch! Six miserly pork dumplings (I recognise the type I sometimes buy frozen) came in sesame oil with dry chilli concoction sold for 3 quid a bottle in the supermarket round the corner. They were accompanied by a bowl of water they had been boiled in with a few shavings of spring onions sprucing up its sad appearance.

Two skimpy spoonfuls of mapo doufu had no trace of aubergines or mince, just silken tofu and pre-made "Szechuan gravy". The same gravy was dolloped on overcooked soba in our "spicy Szechuan noodles", perhaps the most uninspiring and insipid since a bowl of instant noodles at a railway station in the Russian countryside back in 1999.

We stood up from the table half hungry and 35 quid poorer but the worst was the horrid aftertaste of a trashy Chinese eatery.