Ping over to Lazy Sumday at Ping Pong!! (Ping Pong (London))

Member Name: Homer213

Product:	Ping Pong (London)
Date:	21/06/09 (146 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Yummy yummy yummy food. Lazy Sumday is good value!

Disadvantages: Can be expensive

Honestly, I don't know if I have the energy to write this! I have just come back from "Lazy Sumday" (unlimited Dim Sum), at Ping Pong and I'm truly stuffed!!

Ping Pong is a dim sum restaurant. Their tag line being "Ping Pong Dim Sum - little steamed parcels of deliciousness". For those of you who have never tried Dim Sum, it's kind of like Chinese Tapas. Load of small dishes, with about 3 servings per dish.
The nice thing about Dim Sum is it really is a way of sharing your meal with your friends, and by tradition is quite a sociable meal. So Dim Sum is a great type of meal to have a meal with friends. You get to try and share many small dishes.

Ping Pong are a chain restaurant and with 12 restaurants located in and around Central London. We love going to the one in Westbourne Grove, London. The staff are always polite, it's quite a large restaurant, quite spacious and you do not feel like you are sitting "on top" of other diners.

But on to my "Lazy Sumday". We love Dim Sum. I got hooked on dumplings whilst travelling round China, and the majority of Ping Pong's menu is focused on dumplings. So my "Lazy Sumday" - all you can eat Dim Sum for £18.49 including VAT and service, on Sundays - is really a dumpling feast.

"Lazy Sumday" allows you to order from nearly all sections of the menu excluding drinks, set menus, signature dishes, specials or desserts. But don't let that deter you. There are still over 40 dishes you can choose from of which 13 are dumplings, the rest cover everything from salads to pickled vegetables to prawn toast to soup to spring rolls!! Plenty to choose from!
The dishes are listed on a paper menu, you select which ones you want, and they take the order away, book it, and then return your paper menu to you for next time.

The average price per dish, which is generally 3 serves is £3.00 to £3.50. So to get value for money I need to eat at least 6 dishes of dim sum or at least 18 dumplings. Remember I said I like dumplings. I will also add at this point, that this was a planned trip to Ping Pong today, so my friends and I did not eat breakfast in order to leave plenty of room for Ping Pong!! It was quite a "marathon session" - round about 2 hours, and I'm not in any hurry to cook dinner any time soon! I'm not going to tell you how many dishes we ordered and ate (I don't believe in wasting food, so we only order again once we have finished everything on the table) but we definitely got value for money today!

As mentioned I love dumplings, and my favourites are prawn and chive, or "Chive" on the Ping Pong menu. These, like most dumplings arrive at our table in steamed baskets stacked one on top of the other. The Chive dumplings are a beautiful half moon shaped dumpling, green in colour due to the chive pastry and stuffed with prawns!! Yummy. My boyfriend loves the traditional Pork Shu Mai - "Pork and king prawns in an open pastry topped with a Chinese wolfberry"
So we ordered lots of these 2 types of dumplings!! We also had some great seafood sticky rice, pork buns, beef puffs and spring rolls! Plus a whole lot more. Ping Pong change their menu quite often so I always try their new dishes when I return.

To wash it all down, Ping Pong has a great drinks menu - both alcoholic and non alcoholic. I've tried their alcoholic cocktails before and they are really really good (Lemongrass & lime or vanilla lemon & vodka are great), but today we stuck with their Fresh Lemonade which you mix yourself with various flavourings/purees. Normally there is peach and raspberry puree available, but today they had some new flavours; passion fruit, melon, green apple or strawberry. This comes as a shot of puree/flavouring which you pour into your lemonade! Yummy!! I can highly recommend the passion fruit one.

I also like to order one of their flowering green teas, which come in a tall tumbler glass and they top up with hot water throughout your meal. It's a great way to help the food go down!!

We were offered desserts and coffees, but we really didn't need it.

If you aren't up to stuffing yourself silly with Dim Sum on Lazy Sumday, the full menu and the set menus are also available everyday, including Sundays. Their set menus are really good value too. The "Dumpling Fix" set menu for £11.79 gets you 2 steamed buns, 7 dumplings of various types, 2 duck spring rolls, and a dessert. Pretty good for under £12!!

The other great thing about Ping Pong is there are lots of vegetarian options available! It's also a family kid friendly restaurant - Westbourne Grove always seems to have balloons for the kids! (kids under 12 can have Lazy Sumday too for £9.25)

So if you are looking for a nice place to go, love dim sum, are really really hungry then Lazy Sumday at Ping Pong might be the place for you!!!

Summary: Fast for a week and then head to a Lazy Sumday at Ping Pong!!