As much as I love this logo…
I love China Doll, the brand at least. They have, IMHO, the best logo in Sri Lanka, the best restaurant website (by far), efficient online ordering, everything. I also like their menu, at least concept wise. However, three of us tried them for lunch, and we just didn’t like their food.
China Doll is a spin-off from Chinese Dragon, which we don’t really like either, but younger, hipper and different. It takes the classic Chinese food in a tall box idea from the West and brings it to Sri Lanka. Which is kinda the problem. It tastes like Western Chinese food, kinda bland and unpunchy, not like the Sri Lankan Chinese food I like. They proudly state that they don’t use MSG, but they should use MSG, there’s nothing wrong with the spice and the food all, perhaps as a consequence, lacks the strong umami taste that makes Chinese food so good.
As Savan’s review says:
Everything was a little bit flat – the char kway teow was packed with a generous amount of sea food but the flavor was bland, the noodles in black bean sauce were similarly lacking in flavor. Shruthi’s comment- it tastes like East Asian food you get in the West was probably the most appropriate. Just blander and lacking the flavors we are used to. We know you can always add more salt and chilli but the spices, garlic and ginger flavors we curry munching Lankans like also seemed to be missing. (China Doll | YAMU
Honestly, we all really wanted to like China Doll. Everything about them is well presented and good. The food just lacks something. Check out the review and see if we tried the wrong stuff or something. I’ve always thought Chinese Dragon was mediocre, but I thought China Doll would be different. I still dig the brand.
Exactly what I was thinking: best local logo i’ve seen. I would hire whoever did their logo to do a few more for a few businesses. In my opinion, delivery used to be good, but has declined since. Food is meh, the seasame chicken isn’t too bad, though.
I don’t get the review – basically the food is labelled bad because it is actually ‘authentic’ chinese food and it DOESN’T change this to “suit the SL palate which is for spices/chillies”? Meaning a spaghetti dish from an Italian restaurant in SL is going to be labelled “bad” because it doesn’t contain chilli powder?
If the spaghetti dish is bland, sure. Authentic is quite the weasel word when you want to excuse flavourless food.
Authentic foods,especially from the West are bland. End of story, I’ve eaten Western foods from London, Dubai and Australia and they’re all bland. And authentic Chinese food would never go down well with Sri Lankans. We need copious amounts of spices for us to find food appealing.
I love the Char Kway Teow from China Doll, I ask them to make it spicy and BAM, I’ve got my Sri Lankan Chinese dish!
I feel, you might be killing traffic to YAMU with your posts. You sum everything up in your post and the reader already gets your collective opinion about the place.
If you rate it good, I’d go check the photos and go back for contacts or directions later. But if you give a bad review, why take the trouble of even clicking the link to YAMU? In any case, after reading your take, I’d never read the article in YAMU…
:| just saying…
Never eaten at China Doll, but not all western food is bland. Unless you’re ordering boiled fish or something, you’ve just got badly prepared food. Char Kway Teow and such food isn’t bland in Singapore and Hong Kong, so it shouldn’t be here, not unless it’s badly prepared.
What is ‘flavourful’ and ‘flavourless’ is pretty subjective. If you have been eating hot curries all your life, Japanese food is definitively going to come across as being ‘bland’ and ‘flavourless’ but if you’ve eaten Japanese food all your life curries are ‘over spiced’ and ‘flavourless’ (ie not tasting the original base food, but just the spices added to it. Japanese cuisine is based on exhibiting the natural flavour of the food and not hiding it under a gazillion different spices like we do). I don’t think it is fair to dis a restaurant because it is giving out authentic fare. Is it fair to go to a Jain restaurant and then dis the food because they don’t use meat or garlic in their meals?
They are bland to your palate, not necessarily to others’. I don’t find Italian food bland at all, but I bet if you gave it to some gamay people in remote Sri Lanka they would think it very bland. Then give them sushi/sashimi and they might think you are bat shit crazy to be eating raw fish with plain rice. Authentic Chinese food, with the exception of Szechuan cuisine, is not spicy.
The point made was that it tasted like the East Asian food you get in the West- watered down for the European palate. That doesn’t make it authentic East Asian food, Char Kway Teow, and Nasi Goreng, as far as I know should have some kick. Bland also doesn’t necessarily mean just lacking chili- by that definition nearly all Western food is bland, what I was trying to convey was a simple lack of flavor/seasoning- maybe they heard Indi’s accent and toned it down too much?
Side note; actually the food in China can be surprisingly spicy. Not just szechuan- guizhou, hunan, yunan chongqing- all have dishes that can leave even spice-loving lankans in struggling.
All over China you find dishes that are as spicy or spicier than anything you find in Sri Lanka served.
also Jianxi, they seem to have dishes that are like pure fresh chili, not dried chili like szechuan.
Oh yeah, that’s totally fine. You can after all get lots of flavour without using spices. I love Japanese cuisine!
In terms of reliable, easy to use, relatively quick delivery service, it’s really either China Doll or Pizza Hut. I go with China Doll more times than not. At least they have some interesting and unusual choices, and although they tend to fall well short of greatness (possibly because of the no-MSG promise for the fashionably paranoid), I have found them to be mostly pretty enjoyable.
They used to have these huge submarine sandwiches which really were the best in town. The steak one was a real sloppy meaty delight. Sadly they’ve dropped them.
I’ll admit the Nasi Goreng is a disappointment. It comes in this bewildering range of configurations, so no wonder your order got mixed up. I find it too sour and it has that kind of spiciness that feels like its going to cause indigestion.
Btw, the best Nasi Goreng I’ve had in Colombo was, oddly enough, at the Hilton’s Echelon Pub. The satays were tremendous, and it wasn’t even ridiculously expensive.