'As good as your local Chinese restaurant or your money back!' Who can resist such a claim? Particularly when your local Chinese takeaway is excellent! So we bought a box reduced to £1.50 from a supermarket where every little counts, along with the necessary chicken and vegetables.

As we opened the box we were pleasantly surprised by the separate stages that you had to go through, seemed authentic. A packet of this powder, and a pouch of this sauce etc. and of course the freeze dried noodles. I began to look forward to it.

My wife began cooking while I put the children to bed and it smelt delicious, really very good. And then it came to adding the final part of the meal, the sauce. It was at this part that an acrid smell was suddenly given off. Not one to waste food, I made sure it was still dished up.

And as we tasted it was as foul tasting as it smelt. I had a burning sensation in my mouth! It was so bad I had to throw it out. I THREW OUT FOOD! All of it went in the bin, that's how terrible it tasted. I have never thrown out a whole meal before or since.

Quickly I reported it on their website and they refunded me by postal order very quickly. I thought that was the end of the matter and decided never to be Wanchai Ferry again.

However, 6 months later a box arrived in the post with another carton of Wanchai Ferry, a £20 postal order and a letter explaining that they had found a problem with the product, had corrected it and would I like to try it again. We did (but with vegetables only, no way was I wasting more chicken!). True, the acrid burning taste had now gone, which was good. But what was left now was almost as bad. Again I couldn't finish it.

The noodles were rubbery (and that's not a pun) and the taste of the sauce was so overpowering and unsubtle that I may as well have been downing a jar of original paste.

Despite their generosity it goes without saying that I could never recommend this product and will not be buying it again. It was ferry poor!