the service was terrible!

my issue is not with the food: it was good - what there was of it.

there is no menu: you are asked how hungry you are: a little, quite or very.

we said quite. my friend who goes there often said we would have course after course. they failed to appear.

what did appear was very good but not nearly enough. and what food we did get we had to wait for hours, literally.

for the final dish, supposed to be the main one, he offered us SLICED duck (which takes 24 hours to prepare) rather than CRISPY duck, which is standard fare.

as a reviewer of asian restaurants i am sure you know the difference. he was able to offer us the sliced because a table downstairs had cancelled last moment.

he offered it to us after admitting that we had not been given the proper food.... when it arrived it was crispy duck.

the waiter preparing it with his two forks refused to accept that we had been offered sliced duck.

we all sat there stating, again and again, that this was not sliced duck, etc. he carried on preparing it, refusing to meet our gazes, saying quietly, 'really?', 'oh?' and just ignoring us.

finally i got hold of anotehr waiter and asked for the manager. he arrived and took the dish away immediately and admitted the mistake.

but it was not a mistake: that much was painfully obvious. the manager had known what was happening and clearly thought we wouldn't notice.

i am sure that you can dine there and have a good experience.

we had a bad one. other people should know about it.

i used to come to this restaurant with my family in the late eighties and early nineties. we always loved it.

i moved away and i did not return until tonight. my wife booked a table several weeks ago.

we picked the hunan because we were meeting a friend of mine, who is a director and a partner in one of the pimlico green companies, and so it was most easy for her to join us - and while i had not been to the hunan for a decade, at least, my friend told me it was her favourite restaurant and it had only got better.

she told that there were no menus, they brought you a succession of delicious dishes, and the service was excellent.

unfortunately, because my wife booked rather than my friend, the owners did not recognise the name so we were given a rather dreadful table upstairs.

the food was delicious - but only arrived after chronic prompting - and arrived in tiny samples.

the food was good (rather than excellent) - but the service was terrible - our service was overseen by a woman (apparently chinese) who seemed to think we had no idea about chinese food.

after a series of annoying discrepancies and extremely sparse offering the evening was (finally, and completely) ruined when we were presented with crispy duck rather than sliced duck.

anyone who is familiar with the difference between these two dishes knows that the difference is irreconcilable.

the chinese woman played dumb. she refused to acknowledge what she had herself pretended to write down only an hour before: sliced, not crispy duck.

in the event the crispy duck was dry and tasteless. clearly, the management had believed we would not know the difference.

appalling - stupi - completely unnecessary. the attempts by the maitre d' to pretend that it was a mistake were embarrassing: as he apologised for the woman's behaviour she stood behind him glaring... never again.

Great food and a wonderful experience. A bit repetitive if you go there often though as they bring out a variety of dishes which seem to be the same each time I go there.

Hunan is certainly the most charmingly eccentric Chinese restaurant anywhere but Mr Peng won't be too happy to entertain the high street takeaway set. The food at Hunan is stunning - bursting with flavour and far better than my wife and I have ever tasted in any other Chinese restaurant.

Hunan is not cheap, but offers a dining experience for the connoisseur who still boasts a few taste buds.

Woah - don't eat for a few days before coming to Hunan, if you go for the chef's meal you get about 20 dishes! All the food was excellent though, and there was loads of different tastes to try.
Nice one Hunan.

Hunan has reasonable food served by rude (extremley, unbearably) owner, guaranteed!