Welcome Chinese Takeaway On Belmont Road Belfast

We shared a sweet & sour chicken in batter with fried rice tonight, from the Welcome takeaway on Belmont Road, Belfast. I hadn't ordered from there for years, so decided to give it a go.

It was delivered quickly, within fifteen minutes. The total bill came to £5.50, including delivery. The portion was large; batter and rice satisfactory.

I was a bit disappointed. To my mind, sauce is the key ingredient of a great sweet & sour sauce. It should be half sweet (sugar) and half sour (vinegar), with soy sauce, a dollop of ketchup, perhaps pineapple juice; raw vegetables like carrot, onion, red pepper, pineapple etc. It requires something like cornflour to give it the consistency of a syrup. The pungency depends on the kind of vinegar used.

The Welcome's sauce was weak and insipid. Too runny; I couldn't taste any particular flavour in it at all; certainly none of my listed ingredients (although surely some must have been therein). There was one solitary chunk of pineapple and something red like a sliver of tomato skin.

The quest continues...