Christmas with a twist at Chi Kitchen

Last week I was invited to try the Christmas menu at Chi Kitchen, which is a Pan-Asian restaurant on the ground floor of Debenhams on London’s Oxford Street. With Masterchef 2014 winner, Ping Coombes, as the Executive Chef I was excited to see what festive dishes with an Asian twist were on offer. Not only that, Chi Kitchen is an Opentable Diners’ Choice 2016 winner.

The Christmas menu is designed to be a sharing menu and costs £28 per person, with a minimum of two people sharing. After perusing the wine menu, we opted for a bottle of prosecco to go with our meal.

The starters are chilli prawns, which are deep fried with chilli, curry leaves, garlic, onions, spring onions, walnuts and salt & pepper and served with a chilli lime sauce, sweet potato fries with a mixed berry mayonnaise and turkey sliders with salt & pepper, all served on a sharing platter. I must admit, the colour of the mixed berry mayonnaise was a bit alarming but actually the flavour was quite subtle and complimented the sweet potato fries.

My favourite was the chilli prawns, which were amazing with the chilli lime sauce. They were spicy but so delicious! Even my husband thought they were good and he doesn’t like prawns. I also enjoyed the crispy fried noodles which formed the base of both the prawns and the sweet potato fries. They are mainly for decoration but snacking on a few is rather enjoyable.

For mains, we feasted on Turkey Insal – grilled turkey with a kalamsansi sauce, Choo Chee prawns and baked salmon with Japanese yuzu mayonnaise sauce. All firm Christamas favourites – but with a twist! They were accompanied by egg fried rice with snow peas.

The sauce for the Choo Chee prawns was like a satay and worked really well with the grilled prawns.

Personally, I’m not a massive fan of cooked salmon and the baked salmon was slightly on the dry side for me. I know it’s a Christmas classic, however we never have it for Christmas in our house. I’m so glad our waitress suggested keeping the chilli lime sauce from the starters as it went beautifully with the salmon and I actually really enjoyed it! The presentation of the salmon reminded me of the octopus balls we tried last month in Japan.

The grilled turkey with the kalamsansi sauce was really nice. I have to say the sauce also went really well with the salmon as it was a bit like a teriyaki sauce.

The egg fried rice was very yummy – who doesn’t like egg fried rice? My husband actually hates peas but luckily there weren’t too many and he could easily pick them out! We even ordered another portion.

Of course no Christmas meal is complete without dessert (even if you are stuffed and just want to lie on the couch). To round off the meal we enjoyed a warm walnut chocolate brownie with vanilla clotted cream and served with blood orange and star anise custard.

The brownie was very yummy and I absolutely loved the presentation – the blue plate is gorgeous!

We thoroughly enjoyed our meal from Chi Kitchen and I’d highly recommend it for a Christmas party meal. The service was excellent too and our waitress, Nuria, was very friendly and made sure we were well looked after.

Our meal was complimentary in exchange for an honest review.