Amazing Xinjiang restaurant at Camberwell!!!!! The soup noodle and skewers are the best dishes of the night. I can't wait to go back and try other dishes. The price is very reasonable. We had 4 people, 6 dishes and 3 beers that night, the bill was only 50 pounds!!!!!! 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
My friend and I came to have a catch up chat after a long time having not seen one another. I booked and was glad I did! It was heaving full of students (like ourselves), but our table was cleared and we had plenty of room to chat. The food is amazing, though a little spicy for my friend. I am more of a pour chilli on everything person. We had a selection of vegetarian delights which surpassed anything you would have had from your average Chinese takeaway. All of this and our beers turned out to be outrageously cheap! I will be coming here regularly.
The days are getting darker. To top it all off, it was wet and cold enough for gloves when I made a trip to Silk Road - A Chinese restaurant in Camberwell. This joint had better
Surprisingly tasty little gem in south London. Plenty of fast food places on this road but this place was a stand out chinese restaurant. The noodles were hand made and super tasty and the charcoal grilled meat and fish skewers were fantastic.
I advise you to pre book or be prepared to queue on a Saturday. Well worth the wait though.
Only in London do you get to try food from a provence different to the normal.
Silk Road is an unassuming place on Camberwell Church Street, with more of a café vibe than that of a restaurant. Having heard reports of hour-long waits mid-week we booked as it was a Saturday, and good job as the place was absolutely packed. Good sign!. Silk Road focuses on culinary favourites from the Xinjiang province in North-West China, which demonstrates other Asian influences such as kebabs and dumplings, but with Chinese spicing – LOTS of chilli, as well as heavy cumin and star anise.
Totally amazing flavours. Try the noodles and the Aubergine- truly a treat
I loved this place the food wa good and spicy and the service was lovely! Lamb was tender and the noodles were great! Can't wait to take friends back, thank you
Not your average Chinese!. Home style cabbage, shrimp, egg and spring onion dumplings, middle plate chicken, too many lamb shish, kelp salad, loadsa beer, big grease stains down the front of our shirts, massive smiles on our faces, tiny bill. Nuff said!
The home style cabbage is unbelievable.
Excellent place. Hot, spicey and you get loaddsssss... Very cheap.
Gingle Lists Everything
+4.5
Silk Road is cheap, delicious, and a pain to get to. More of a café than a restaurant, we remembered to book a few days before we planned to go and as we heard them turning people away, saying there was a one hour wait, we realised it had been essential. From just after we arrived the place was full and stayed that way all night. On a Wednesday! In the depths of Camberwell! I had he
I can honestly say, having now moved through the entirety of the menu at Silk, that there is nothing on there which isn't up to scratch- it is all delicious. Particular highlights include the tripe in chili sauce, the kelp and the belt noodles. The dumplings are also fantastic.
Getting us right back on track were two large grilled swordfish shish kebabs. The fish was spicier than I expected with a ground chilli crust. After the hot potatoes the fish was the dish that tipped me over my pathetic chilli threshold and my brow began to glisten.
Much has been written about Silk Road in Camberwell, recently, with reviews from firstly Jay Rayner in the Guardian and more recently a 3/5 star write-up in Time Out London . It's been on my radar for over a year now, after reading about the restaurant on
It's a rare menu and worth a look in for that reason if you're a local. The Medium Plate Chicken may be worth a special trip, though well meaning and a nautical mile beyond the standard crap in a tray merchants that dot Zone 2, I honestly don't know wheth
I am yet to find a Sichuan restaurant I don't like. I'm sure there must be bad ones out there somewhere - Chinatown might be a good place to look, God knows there are enough crappy restaurants of other kinds round those parts, but there's something about Sichuan food that seems to guarantee a certain minimum standard. I don't know why exactly that should be, though I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that the level of spicing and uncompromising use of offal in even the most basic dishes means it's impossible to do any kind of toned-down tourist-friendly version, and so anything you end up with is likely to be at the very least explosively hot, powerfully flavoured and containing parts of pig you never even knew existed. However, Silk Road, in common I believe with another of my favourite Chinese restaurants Gourmet San, is not technically strictly Sichuanese - it apparently serves the cuisine of Xinjiang, which means a bit less pork (though based on our meal last nigh
This restaurant is cheap and cheerful! Though tiny and always crowded, the food is fantastic. Specializing in Sichuan cuisine, the majority of their dishes are rather spicy.
Their Big chicken dish is fabulous... Though you need to order it in advance if you want to make sure they have it.
It is also best to bring cash as both times I've been there the card machine "wasn't working."
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Where do I start?
The stir-fried lamb shish so full of spicy cumin-chilliness I can feel each of my cells bursting with life the more I eat?
Or the warming hearty Big Plate Chicken so good I want to swim in it? Or how about the naughty-but-oh-so-nice lamb shish that offers a chunk of tasty rendered lamb fat nestled between each piece of deliciously spiced lamb?
I'll start at the beginning.
This was my second visit to Silk Road. We'd been before for a friend's birthday and I was so blown away I'd forgotten the finer details - the only thing I could remember is that it was bloody amazing.
Silk Road serves food from China's Xinjiang province in the country's north west meaning a brilliant fusion of more Middle Eastern flavours with Chinese methods.
This time, we had a table booked for 8 at 8pm but 8.20 we were still standing waiting for our table.
"I'm waiting for a big table to be freed up," said the maitre'd with barely disguised frustration and anger as I eyed up a smaller table that had just become empty but was about to be filled by a group who had been waiting for much less time than us.
I should've been annoyed, but they were busy, it was hot in there and the tea we were given by way of an apology by the time we sat down soothed my anger.
I was in charge of ordering having been here once before, and I felt a sense of responsibility making sure I remembered everything we'd had before. But the staff here know the favourites, and we able to gently suggest things we might like.
Grilled dumplings with lamb and onion were tasty, as were the steamed pork and celery (both £3 for 10). But these were merely appetisers, sent in early to get us excited.
Next came the Home Style Cabbage (£5.50) that could single-handedly ressurect the beleaguered vegetable's reputation. Served with in a deliciously savoury, slightly sweet sauce and chillies it is bizzarrely good but no amount of me saying that will get you close to knowing how good it is, as all you can think is, 'But how good can cabbage really be?'
Trust me, try it and you'll see.
Next came Chicken with Green Chilli (£7) that dances in front of the eyes with its bright green and red colours of the chillies before the party moves into the mouth. There was a spicy kick, but not overwhelming, and the chicken incredible: delicious, moist and so tasty.
Next came the dish I dreamt about after my first visit: Stir Fried Lamb Shish (£6.50) with handpulled noodles. The noodles are studded with chunks of lamb marinated in cumin and chilli in such vast quantities it should be totally overpowering. But it's not - it's a beautifully, confidently flavoured dish that enlivens like nothing I've ever eaten before. We soon ordered another as I looked at the awestruck faces of my fellow diners. Beautiful. Even writing about it makes me long for it.
Then came the Big Plate Chicken (£15) a popular Xinjiang dish of chicken on the bone in a slightly sweet broth with potatoes, green chilli and dried chilli. Everyone tucks in and halfway through, a waiter comes to dunk noodles in the remaining soup to soak up the broth. It's perfect communal eating, not that anyone needs any more bonding sharing an eating experience like this.
Finally, the Xinjiang Lamb Shish (£1 each, min order of five). Pieces of lamb separated by fat served on a skewers, rubbed in cumin and chilli and so, so good. Their not for the faint-hearted and one has to be a fan of fat to fully enjoy these, but the celebration of something so naughty, and made even more special with its seasonings, is just beautiful.
We were stuffed by the end. We'd ordered a couple more dishes; I forget which ones so sated and misty-eyed I was by the end of it.
Our bill came to just over £100, whcih is ridiculous given how incredible the food is. I love this place and I want to tell everyone about it. But not so many that my wait for a table is repeated.
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I have heard a lot of people raving about this place, so a group of us finally made a visit to Silk Road down in Camberwell. Not exactly a place that I would think of when thinking of places to eat, but anything in the name of food hey?
We went at a really odd hour around 4pm - a late lunch...? or really early dinner...
The place is quite small and thankfully wasn't busy when we were there.
There were six of us, so we ordered quite a few dishes to share. We had plenty of cabbage and vegetable dishes to go round - tasty, although I did find some of it a bit too greasy for me personally. The dumplings were quite big and a good generous portion. The skewers were one of my favourites. We had the lamb skewers which were nicely marinated with lots of delicious spices, and the red snapper fish skewers were really tasty and moreish.
The big plate/bowl chicken was another favourite for us - a huge plate of chicken in a warm and comforting broth, served with thick noodles. Perfect on a cold winters day.
Overall, it was a pretty good meal, and really good value for money.
I wouldn't say that it's one of my favourite Chinese places that I have been to, but that's my personal opinion.
Apparently there are queues outside during peak meal times, so I would recommend going early if you want to avoid waiting in the cold...
Portions are big and generous, and the prices are cheap for London standards, so it's no surprise it's such a big hit with the foodies...
A good cheap eat destination if you live around the area, or are willing to travel for it...
Nice chinese restaurant, perfect to order several dishes and share with the people you go with. This place is not very big so you may have to wait a little before you get a table, we waited for 20 minutes but it totally was worth it. It doesn't have a special decoration also, so when you go there it is really because of the food.
We ordered mix shreds salad, boiled rice, pork and celery dumplings, pork and black fungus and a noodles dish (a can't remember which). Everything was really delicious but the dishes don't come at the same time (something we could observe in other chinese places).
In London, compared to Portugal, all the chinese places we went were really good and a cheap choice. Besides that, they all felt like genuine places, attended by chinese people, which is always a good sign.
Gingle Lists Everything
+4.5
Chinese is arguably my boyfriend’s favourite cuisine, but, while I enjoyed the odd chow mein or spring roll, it wasn’t something that I routinely craved. Discovering the regional cuisine of Sichuan, Hunan and, now, XinJiang has rather changed that.
While they’re all, obviously, different regions, they do have similarities in their liberal use of hot peppers and offally ingredients. Ba Shan is an excellent example of this and Silk Road, where I went on Wednesday, is another.
There’s at least a handful or reviews and blog posts about this place and I must admit I’m not really adding anything new to the canon. Silk Road is cheap, delicious, and a pain to get to. More of a café than a restaurant, we remembered to book a few days before we planned to go and as we heard them turning people away, saying there was a one hour wait, we realised it had been essential. From just after we arrived the place was full and stayed that way all night. On a Wednesday! In the depths of Camberwell!
I had heard that the menu was quite short but it was still long enough for it to take us quite some time to decide on which dishes to choose. They all sounded pretty good and we didn’t want to waste our long trip down (and back) by ordering something sub-par.
There were four of us and we went for the following:
Big plate chicken
Double cooked pork
Pork and celery dumplings
Eight lamb skewers
Bak choi in garlic sauce (we felt like just ought to have some veg – our mothers would be proud)
Shredded tripe with onions and chillies (a wild card dish at Stephen’s insistence that we try something different)
Two boiled rice.
The pork and celery dumplings came first. You get ten for £3.00 and each dumpling was very generously filled. They were great, slightly chewy dough with juicy pork and finely shredded celery inside. It’s not a combination I’d had before but it really worked, with the celery adding a lightness and freshness to the dumplings.
Shortly after the double cooked pork arrived – thin slices of it thoroughly coated in a sweet, hot sauce with liberal red and green chillies. That sauce was fantastic – the first bite had quite a kick to it but it was manageable if you didn't eat too many of the fresh chillies at once. The pork was soft and each bit had a bit of naughty fat on its edge.
I worried that they might bring my least anticipated dish at the end – the tripe, but luckily, it came out as we were halfway through the pork. It didn’t look that appetising – the onions and tripe were pale and drab with the fresh green chillies the only vibrant and inviting thing on the plate. We all had a tentative bite and pronounced it – OK! The tripe was soft, the texture not unpleasant, and, to be honest, didn’t have much of a taste. It was inoffensive. We had a few forkfuls each and then eagerly went back to finish off the pork.
Then the skewers arrived. From my reading I knew not to let these sit on the table for too long and quickly grabbed my two skewers. Each skewer had about 6 little morsels of crispy, fatty lamb dusted with cumin (I think). They were amazing. My favourite dish up until that point.
The piece de resistance was, of course, the big plate chicken. A massive bowl was brought to the table full of a steaming brown sauce, star anise scents emanating from it. There were the requisite chillies floating about – fresh green ones and those dried red chillies that must have been soaking in the broth for so long they had rehydrated. There were large chunks of potato and of course the chicken pieces on the bone.
We scooped out several pieces of chicken and potato into little bowls, with a bit of the broth and all marvelled at the taste. I have never tasted chicken like it. It didn’t even look like chicken – it looked like barbequed pork. It was so dark, so fully had it absorbed the flavours from the soup. They must marinate the hell out of that chicken. The broth had a very savoury taste to it that was incredibly more-ish. But this was also where the heat lay and it was easy to forget this when you were spooning it out. There were sniffles all round.
We’d only taken a little out of the pot when the handful of noodles (the largest noodles I’ve ever seen) were dumped into the plate. I’d thought this happened when you’d completely depleted the dish of meat and potatoes, but no matter.
Such was the size and length of them, one portion worked out to about two noodles each. Now, I like noodles, but normally I’m more of a fan of the thinner, glass or rice noodles. These were thick, but flat, and meaty, chewy. Slightly sweet. I loved them.
Our feast started to defeat us and we weren’t able to completely finish our big plate, though we did dredge the bowl for the last pieces of chicken. I finished off my share of the rice by adding lots and lots of the soup to create a savoury rice pudding, which in my humble opinion was a fantastic creation.
By this point, I’d ingested so many chillies I think I was beginning to feel a bit spacey. You don’t even really notice it at first but that burn slowly builds. Our very garlicky bak choi provided some relief from the heat, but I kept dipping mine in the soup th
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For many, the mention of "Silk Road" conjures up images of traders and travellers from yester-year making their way along a series of trade routes from China and India to the Mediterranean Sea. For me, it conjures up images of delicious fiery Chinese dishes and a pilgrimage South to Camberwell.
Paying homage to the vital role the actual Silk Road played in the development of international relations and cultural interaction throughout history, Silk Road has made a name for itself serving up fantastic Chinese fusion dishes traditional to the northern Chinese province of Xinjiang at prices which are so affordable, they leave you thinking they must've missed something off the bill. Such is their success that they have recently been named as the winners of the "Best Cheap Eats" category of the OFM awards in 2014 and in doing so, receiving the recognition and accolades they so rightly deserve. And you only need one visit to understand why...
Reading through the menu is an exercise in self discipline as the combination of incredible sounding dishes and impossibly cheap prices makes it impossible to settle on a "normal" sized meal. Our order for 4 of us read:
- Home-style aubergine;
- Garlic pak choi;
- A portion of beef and onion fm dumplings (a ridiculous 10 for £3);
- 5 skewers of the Xinjiang lamb shish;
- The stir-fried lamb shish with hand-pulled noodles;
- The luxury noodles; and
- The iconic middle plate chicken.
Hard as it may be to believe, this was us ordering with restraint. If it was up to me, I would've ordered the whole menu - and after what we had, I wish I had as dish after dish was just consistently beautiful and packed with flavours and aroma which would excite any tastebud.
Though Silk Road is famed for their Big Plate Chicken (or the conveniently named Middle Plate Chicken for a smaller portion of traditional Xinjiang dish of bone on chicken and potato with belt noodle in a chilli and 5-spice broth), my highlights were the lamb shish dishes which were both a masterful use of cumin and chilli. Word of caution though, these dishes are SPICY so handle with care. For those not a fan of hot, go for the Luxury noodles (hand pulled noodles with special lamb, vegetables and a fried egg) which is as good as the name suggests.
So all said and done and comfortably rolling on home, I can say with full confidence, BELIEVE THE HYPE! It is that good and worth whatever bus/train/tube/taxi ride you need to take to get there. Oh did I also mention the whole meal for the 4 of us only came to a ridiculous £45? That's not just value, it's borderline theft. Get there!
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Terrific Food. Great Prices and simple atmosphere. What more could you want? Best Chinese food I've had in London.
Authentic Chinese perfect for spicy food lovers! Happy to have discovered this pearl. Must try: shredded potatoes, lamb skewers and pork dumplings
Had cucumber salad, beef and onion dumplings, noodles with lamb and cabbage, pork belly hot dish. Dishes were tasty and spicy.
Laimdota Bauere (Laima)
+5
The food here warms both your belly and heart. Has hand-pulled noodles and veggie options. So good!
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Went there to try the CABBAGE homestyle (£8.80) as recommended and it did not disappoint. I am a meat eater but I can happily eat this with a bowl of pulled noodles (£2.50). Prices are okay for certain things. I would definitely get the lamb skewers (£1.50 each) they are divine. I wouldn't order the special noodles (£10) comes with egg. I enjoyed the plain noodles with Cabbage more than the £10 special lamb noodles. Everything else was too spicy and full of onions ginger and chili. It dulled my taste buds. I would not recommend those with a chili rating of 2. The pork belly slices (£9) there were hardly any pork. The cucumber salad (£6) was a bit bland, I would have preferred if it had a bit of salt and vinegar. The fried beef dumplings (£6.50) had a funny ginger taste om the inside. I did not enjoy it, they did give a lot for the price though, but the inside tasted like frozen cheap meat. Too bad they didn't have soya milk when I went. It was recommended by a friend.
I would go again, but avoid all the chili dishes. I would try the aubergine homestyle next time. Service is quick, food comes out quickly.
No fuss, no frills. This place serves delicious XinJiang style food - not your average Chinese takeaway or restaurant. The menu has a wide variety of lamb and other uncommon meats like gizzards and tripe as is typical for the region. If those are not to your liking, there is pork and chicken available as well. Great portion size to go with the reasonable price. Recommend ordering a variety of dishes and getting a bowl of rice to go with it. also definitely try the skewers!
Will definitely be coming back.
Amazing food. Very good prices. Big portions.
The lamb skewers were juicy and exploding with flavour.
The Middle Plate Chicken was a little too sweet for me but HUGE and still delicious.
Cucumber salad was a nice side.
Dumplings were hot and delicious.
Service was good, will be coming back here.
There are not many Xinjiang restaurants in London. I have passed by this restaurant many times and have not tried it. Today I finally have the opportunity. There were already a lot of people at 2pm on a Sunday, but the food was served quickly. My friend said that he couldn't taste the Xinjiang flavor, and the dishes were all spicy, but we all felt that the taste was good, and the price was affordable.
Ordered Garlic Pork (seriously expecting a few more slices) and Special Cooked Lamb Noodle. Altogether paid around £13.80, pretty good value for what it is. Not sure how authentic it really is though, but really enjoyed the noodles there.
Occasionally drives pass Camberwell and saw this restaurant rather busy at times and finally had a opportunity to try! The Trio Dumplings were the best out of all the dishes we've ordered. To be honest some of the dishes were way too oily for myself thus it put me off a little bit since there wasn't much flavour. Soya milk was unique being served a milk carton basically 😅 Aubergine again had a slight kick of spice nothing heavy but again soaked with oil. I'm aware of Xinjiang Dishes tend to be oily but yeah... Lamb Skewers were bit pricey but had a nice size meaty part mixture of Lamb fat. The pork belly was Spot on and the same can be said with the Beef Stomach Banging Flavour. Price was above average I would say.
Haven’t been back here for almost 8 years and I am glad to see that they are still around and busy as ever.
Food as good as I remembered and prices haven’t increased that much so still a bargain.
Only issue I felt was the lamb skewers not as good as I remembered it and toilet facilities a bit dirty.
Lovely experience here; we were seated promptly and the service was fast and friendly. This is definitely different from your typical Chinese and the menu is completely authentic, originating from northern china, so don’t be expecting fried rice, spring rolls, calamari etc. we ordered the Xinjiang style noodles and the special cooked lamb noodles and it was delicious.
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