Manchurian Legends

So we stumbled upon this place because we had time to kill and because it had a Unilocal sticker in the window!
We wanted a quick l, tasty meal and this is kind of what we got?
I went for the duck and pancakes as I fancied it and wasn’t too hungry. My dinner companions went for the sweet and sour chicken and egg fried rice, chicken and mushroom dumplings and fried king prawn noodles.
The duck was okay, a bit dry however the plum sauce was good which made up for it. The portion of plum sauce was also very generous so I was pleased about that. I tried my companion’s food — the sweet and sour chicken was okay, egg fried rice was pretty good but the dumplings were really tasty! I kind of regretted not getting them myself!
The service was decent — efficient and polite and we were done in under an hour and able to make our show! The food filled a hole but I think it was pretty standard and average.
We did get some fresh orange at the end which was pretty nice!

This place is amazing, been around for a while and everything you want from a China town experience. The menu is huge and at a good price point, service is the one thing that takes it to 4 not 5 stars — just a bit too «couldn’t care less». Food is snappy, and well prepared, flavors are what I wanted. be aware that the chili signs mean something, not just the usual no event, so a 3 chili dish will make you sweat!

Went to Manchurian Legends on a Friday evening. It was pretty busy, but we were able to get a table after 10 minutes. My friend and I opted for the more westernised Chinese food set menu, while the rest of our group ordered about 6 different authentic Chinese dishes. The food was good, not the best I have ever had, but still very good. My only complaint was that we were served our first course, then the other part of our groups entire order came out and we were still sitting 10 mins later, waiting for about 5 things to come out. I think that we just got kind of lost in the mix. We told the server and they were very quick to rectify, it was just a bit frustrating as the other part of our group finished much sooner. Everything was very fresh, and I had a bite of my friends lamb skewer, it was great, and VERY spicy, and I like spicy. If I were to go back, I think I would just go with the flow and not have two differnt orders at the table, keep it less confusing and defintley order the chili lamb skewers.

I came to Manchurian legends last week after wandering around the Lumiere Festival with some friends. We were all frozen and in need of some warm, spicy Chinese food so the group of us made our way to Chinatown hoping to find a restaurant that could seat all 7 of us quickly. Much to our surprise Manchurian Legends only had a 15 minute wait so we all huddled together outside reading all the award stickers on the front window and trying to keep each other warm. Once seated, and beginning to thaw we perused the menu and placed our orders. Two of the girls in our party had lived in China, so they took the reins in ordering. Slowly but surely platters of steaming food began to arrive. My favorite dishes were the Ma Pao Tofu, the Lotus Root, and the Sichuan Noodles. The Lamb skewers were supposedly rated as one of the «best dishes in London» so we felt obligated to order them. They were delicious and flavorful but they were almost painfully spicy. One of the spiciest things I have eaten in a while, but thats not to say it stopped me form eating an entire skewer. Definitely a good choice in Chinatown for some warming authentic Chinese!

Quite an OK Chinese restaurant in China Town which I would recommend if you are looking for this type of cuisine.
The dumplings and skewers were great.
Like all restaurants in this area it can be a very busy place but they have some tables in the basement which they actually refurbished to make it look nice and Chinese so we were happy with the flexibility and the possibility to dine downstairs although I think the main restaurant area is nicer.

We stumbled upon Manchurian Legends as we were strolling in Chinatown on our first night in London. We had planned to have fish and chips a few blocks down, but after being away from home (Toronto) for so long, I was craving Chinese food.
The restaurant is small and it was a busy night, so it was quite noisy. The service was fairly quick. The servers started speaking Mandarin to us the moment we stepped into the restaurant, so I cannot comment on how well their English is, but the menu is in both Chinese and English.
Since it offers Northern Chinese food, we ordered spicy dishes which included Double-​Cooked Pork Belly Slices with Chilli and Onion and Spicy Green Beans with Minced Pork, along with steamed rice. Both dishes were quite spicy, especially the green beans, and there was a lot of flavour, but I thought it was a little too salty.
Each dish was about £8 which is a little much when compared to Toronto, and the portions were not big, but then again… it is London, UK! I also have nothing to compare to since it was my only Chinese meal in London.

Nothing special!
A lot of artificial flavours and boring food combinations
The service is not the best
I can’t recommend this place :/

Great service, Cindy — Ling took great care of us! Food was awesone. Yumm! Duck, chicken, dumplings were all really great!

Definitely my favourite restaurant in Chinatown. Some very extreme menu items, I think this place was featured on some extreme eating/​restaurant show. The staff aren’t the friendliest but the food has always been awesome and prices are very decent.

Good Chinese, specialising in more of the northern food which means dumplings and noodles more than rice. The setting us quite nice– they try to be the tribal setting of Manchuria so some tents and wood, etc.
Menu has some of the British staple just to make sure all clientele are happy so in additional to regional Chinese, it has crispy duck, sweetcorn soups, prawn crackers, etc. I earn you — these things are not great so I’d you are looking for these. I suggest you would go to other places.
What makes this place more specials are dumplings, skewers and noodles. I like my beef and carrot dumplings, chicken and pork belly skewers, and pork and chilli noodles which is luke warm noodle salad. Not a huge fan of lamb skewers and spices but think that is just my personal taste.
It is also quite inexpensive place but how they make up for it is £2 rice, £4 egg fried rice, and tea, etc… Think it is around 20 – 25 pp place although it us definitely possible to be cheaper if you are price conscious.
Would recommend it.

Chinese food on Lunar New Year… check.
Thanks to the homie, Julia, for bringing us out here. They have a display for their dumpling making which is entertaining for those walking by and those close enough to see within the restaurant.
Food is really good as they focus more on mainland Manchurian foods such as dumplings which seem to have a thicker dough, but the meat (pork) was so good. Definitely a must get item. Other good items to get is the duck and the lamb skewers. Another restaurant in the SGV in LA specializes in skewers from the northern area of china and this had many similarities, which for me was very good.
BIG MINUS was the fact that they serve a cooking wine as a drinking sake. Absolutely terrible. Stick with beers if you’re going to select an alcohol here.
Outside of the cooking wine disaster, this place is pretty darn good, just the cooking wine left a bad taste in my mouth… literally.

very cool décor and a small cozy place. quick service. price is fair.
handmade dumplings, so good :)
lamb skewers so good :)
big plate chicken… a little disappointing… otherwise, i’d give the restaurant a 4 star.

They din’t let me charge my dying phone… Customer Service?!
The food was too oily and tasteless to my liking. I have been to restaurants in LA, DC, NYC and San Diego China-​towns and I would rate this place last… both in terms of Food and Customer Service.

Great eatery for spicy, weird, Asian food lovers — especially when you’re going with a group of mutual spicy, weird, Asian food lovers (more to order = more to try = more bang for your buck?). At Manchurian, you can order a myriad of things from braised pig’s trotters, duck’s tongue, pig’s knuckle, chicken heart, pork’s blood, pig’s offal, thousand year egg tofu, kidneys and pork belly galore. Actually, in hindsight, if you’re curious about eating every part of a pig’s body or are a general pork-​lover, you’d probably have a swell time here as well.
Some highlighted dishes for me are the stir-​fried kidney with chili, which came in a small wok that was kept warm throughout the meal as it was fueled by a small portable butane fire. Whole chunks of chili peppers in the dish with the slightly chewy (but not like gum) and very flavorful kidneys = mouthtastic (I just made up that word). The spicy tripe was also very good — not as spicy but great if you like chewing on innards. Another highlight is the pork belly with pickled vegetable and glass noodles. I don’t think this dish stood out to many people but I really like the tang in pickled cabbage so throwing it in a warm stew with pork belly was thee best. I guess I’ve always liked noodles with some tangy kick to it, such as the popular Korean noodle dish, Naengmyeon with some vinegar, so I think that’s why it tops my list but feel free to order and judge for yourself!
The all-​round favorite of the night was the thousand-​year egg with tofu (can also be referred to as hundred-​year egg). I usually have thousand-​year eggs with congee (yum!) but with the tofu and just the right amount of soy sauce + coriander (aka cilantro, my fellow Americans: P), it proved to be a very creamy, silky combo and a nice light way to start off the meal.
I believe you can reserve at Manchurian but a group of nine of us went in on a Wednesday night without a problem after a short ten minute wait. Bonus points for our waitress — great service handling nine hungry people and still keeping it cool.
If all of what I listed above hasn’t scared you away yet, then stop by Manchurian Legends today and eat eat eat!

Extreme eating!
This was a really fun night out with a chance to sample almost every part of the animal and meet some lovely Unilocalers.
Highlights for me were: chicken hearts (strong but tasty), tripe (very mild, almost plant like), intestine (although that may be because I smothered it in plum sauce), knuckle (gelatinous!), black fungus.
Crispy pig’s ear was not actually crispy but looked quite pretty until you thought about what it actually was.
The only thing I really struggled with was the frog legs — for some reason the second I got a tiny taste I was repulsed and couldn’t eat any more! I also declined to try the blood… probably I would have been fine but by that stage I was about 120% full anyway. We got so much food! Squid skewers were a bit disappointing — quite a strange flavour and extremely tough although perhaps this is because they had been sitting on the table for a while before I tried them.
Among the more conventional dishes, the deep fried chili chicken, pork belly, pickles and glass noodles, and lamb skewers were all delicious.
As Yee Gan said, service was very calm and efficient given the huge amount of dishes ordered by a big table. Impressive. Also as Grant and Yee Gan both mentioned, it was great value.
Would definitely recommend this restaurant if you’d like to try some unusual dishes!

I’m not going to lie: Chinese food is one of my favorites. I also enjoy eating really weird stuff. So when Yee Gan posted about doing some extreme Chinese eating, I was on board. Unfortunately, the venue he selected had been closed for awhile, but this place had moved in. He was quite familiar with it, and several of us pored over the menu to decide if it was reasonable for us to go for or go somewhere else.
I read the menu and was totally on board. There ended up nine of us, and we each ordered a main and a started and we just split the whole thing smörgåsbord style. At points during the evening, there wasn’t even room for anything on the table. I think I tried almost every dish (except the squid skewers as I was told to pass), but everything else was great.
My choice for main was chicken kidney and liver with chili, and I ordered some dumplings. I know dumplings aren’t extreme, but they were making them in the window, and they looked amazing, so I figured we should try them (and they are awesome by the way).
Some highlights of the dinner for me:
— Preserved egg and tofu? It was probably the second thing brought out, and it got a bit overwhelmed with the rest of the food later, but it was super tasty. I’ve never had those preserved eggs before, but they were great mixed with the tofu in a slightly spicy sauce.
— Lamb chili skewers. I think there’s a reason they are on the Time Out London’s top 100 Food list. If you go here, make sure to get at least one or two (and at £1.50 a skewer they are a steal).
— Everything with pork belly. I think we ended up with three different pork belly dishes all made differently. And all of them were great.
— Fried Pig Intestine. Apparently there was some controversy over these. I loved them, others thought they tasted a bit too much like the stuff you might find inside intestines. I don’t know, they were sitting next to me for awhile and I loved them!
— Tripe! Man, the tripe was good. Apparently it can get chewy when it’s in a soup, but ours was cooked with beef tendon and it was incredibly tasty.
— Chilies! They like their chilies. As do I. I didn’t find anything overwhelmingly spicy, but I have a pretty high spice tolerance, so perhaps some others weren’t as excited.
— Frog legs! They were a bit salty to be honest, but I think it was the first time I had them, so I was excited to try them.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot. To be honest, it’s hard to remember nine starters and nine mains. What I do remember is that I plan on going back with the other half and ordering a ridiculous amount of stuff! It also seemed incredibly affordable. It ended up being about £22 a person and we had a ton of stuff left over.

The group meeting for the Unilocal Extreme Eating Event 2.0 had been planning to dine at Wulumuchi, which had promised Chinese food from the Xinjiang area of NW China. Sadly, the restaurant shut before we managed to get to eat there
Undeterred, most of us still agreed to meet up and find somewhere else to indulge our aim of eating ‘weird stuf’! We met outside Wulumuchi’s address and on arrival, I discovered that Manchurian Legends, where we held the Unilocal Extreme Eating Event 1.0 had moved to Wulumuchi’s address! It wasn’t quite as strange a coincidence as it might initially appear when I chatted to the waitress at the restaurant to find that the same company owns both businesses and premises
On inspecting the menu, the group pronounced themselves satisfied with the fare on offer and 9 of us trooped in. The service was good — they managed to seat us within 10 minutes despite us not holding a reservation. The waitress also coped well with our chaotic ‘call out dishes which interest you’ style of ordering, which had worked so well last year that we decided to repeat
Manchurian Legends offers food from he Dongbei region in northern China, which borders Korea and Russia. The cold climate and proximity to Korea lend influences from both, leading to dishes with fiery hot peppers and chilli and pickled vegetables prevalent to Korean cuisine. In addition, there was a healthy amount of offal and other odd cuts on the menu to enable the YEEE to live up to its name
Considering there were only 2.5 ethnic East Asians on the table, I was mighty impressed at the dishes we ordered. There was hardly a conventional dish tio be seen and the myriad dishes were passed eagerly up and down the table with everyone diving in with gusto to sample everything. My personal favourites were chewy chicken heart skewers, crunchy deep fried salt and pepper frog legs and a surprisingly aromatic tofu with 100 year old egg.
Other dishes included crispy pig’s ear (could have done with more crispiness), pig’s blood (savoury cubes with consistency of soft tofu), tripe & beef tendon, kidney & liver, deep fried intestines and pork belly with glass noodles. We were all feeling stuffed by the end of the evening and the bill came to a very reasonable £22 per head
Manchurian Legends proved a hospitable and fun venue to host YEEE 2.0. The interesting menu holds a range of eating experiences and I’d highly recommend it for those wishing to break free of the standard Chinglish fare being served in most of Chinatown