Twenty five minutes after ordering, our food was ready for collection.  I’d been very greedy in my order, adding a quarter of Crispy Duck that I knew we wouldn’t eat but would be lovely cold the next day.  The white plastic bag of goodies with a bag of prawn crackers tied to the side was bursting and crying out to be eaten straight away. So we drove to University Park and had an in car picnic. It was sublime, well almost sublime save for one very unpleasant moment.

I had ordered a selection of starters; Satay Chicken, Salt and Pepper Squid (extra spicy), Salt and Pepper Prawns (extra spicy), a selection of Dim Sum, some prawn toast, Capital crispy chicken and as I mentioned a quarter of Crispy duck that I was keeping for he next day.

The Satay was lovely and very juicy with a faint taste of charring. The prawn toast was much improved on the pre-lockdown version. It’s consistently much better than the standard, limp and greasy prawn toast form your average take-away, but now it is more like crispy slices of baguette with plump and juicy crushed prawns on top – Gorgeous.

My wife doesn’t like squid so she firmly held on to the box of prawns, murmuring about how nice they were whilst I had the squid.  The squid was ok, not the best I’ve had from Zheng to be honest – it was a bit dry and over cooked without the garlic and chilli hit. I love the Garlic and hot chilli kick, so always order these two starters, extra hot.  ’Have some of my chilli bits’ said my wife. So I did. I bit down on the hottest chilli I have ever had in my life, which immediately caused me a fair degree of discomfort, if not downright pain. It then went on to numb my lips and my taste buds for over ten minutes.  I desperately searched the car glovebox for one of those individual sugar sachets that you get at drive through coffee shops – sadly I found nothing except for a few fruity Tic Tacs. 

Why the sugar ? When my young son was in chilli agony at a Thai restaurant in the New Forest once, the waitress brought over some sugar lumps – ‘It takes away the heat’ she said. Apparently she was right according to my boy who then happily went back for more of the chilli madness !!

After ten minutes of cooling down, the Dim Sum was divine. My favourite the steamed Prawn Sia Jiau, a Cantonese dumpling filled with chopped juicy prawns. My wife’s favourite the Grilled Chicken dumplings served with mild Chinese vinegar.  After all this we were full and completely forgot about the Capital crispy chicken sitting in the bag under the quarter duck.  On reflection the sweet sauce coating the chicken might just have done the trick in calming my fiery mouth.

All in all a very lovely in-car decadent picnic with my lovely wife. Some amazing tastes that remind me of why I love Oxford So much.