Tso´s Restaurant

Tso’s is one of the first All-You-Can-Eat restaurants in Liverpool, It’s easily missed as it’s nothing more than a small red door set on a corner with some spiralling steps leading up to the left, next to Doctor Duncan’s (Very nice pub) near the Marriott hotel.

There isn’t many stairs but there are too many for someone in a wheelchair or who might have trouble with stairs. As far as I can tell there is no lift or any other way up so ...
...something about these all you can eat places; must keep the rent down being upstairs).

The walls as you walk up are painted a garish yellow which goes some way to putting you off your food before you’ve even begun. Oh dear, not a good start!

At the top the stairs is a heavy door through which you enter into the restaurant proper.

To your right is a small (And I do mean small) bar/counter area where you ... more

Tso’s is one of the first All-You-Can-Eat restaurants in Liverpool, It’s easily missed as it’s nothing more than a small red door set on a corner with some spiralling steps leading up to the left, next to Doctor Duncan’s (Very nice pub) near the Marriott hotel.

There isn’t many stairs but there are too many for someone in a wheelchair or who might have trouble with stairs. As far as I can tell there is no lift or any other way up so I’m afraid it looses a star for that (Must be something about these all you can eat places; must keep the rent down being upstairs).

The walls as you walk up are painted a garish yellow which goes some way to putting you off your food before you’ve even begun. Oh dear, not a good start!

At the top the stairs is a heavy door through which you enter into the restaurant proper.

To your right is a small (And I do mean small) bar/counter area where you can pay you bill and order those all-important drinks. However you don’t have to order here. Little more about this in a minute.

On entering you are normally greeted by a less than happy looking member of staff and either escorted to you table or if you are waiting on a few others (The place is popular with large group bookings) guided to a small seating area. As I was there with a large group the last time I’ll do the review from that perspective.

Once seated in this small waiting area we were asked for our drink orders, again by a sullen looking member of staff. The restaurant didn’t look too busy at this point and there appeared to be a good number of staff on hand. It still took a good while (At least 10/15 minutes) for our drinks to be brought over. Now this might seem like a petty complaint but at this point there were about 5 of us. I think the order consisted of three bottles of beer, a soft drink and a white wine. Not exactly a hard order to fill.

The seating area is cosy to say the least. The “sofa” is arranged in an L shape around a few round tables, with a couple of chairs and stools scattered about. Behind you is a large fish tank, which can be quite relaxing to look at while waiting on your drink. Just don’t be tempted to start drinking out of the tank if you get too thirsty while you wait.

As more of our group arrived (I think there was 20 of us booked in) the area started to get more than a little cramped. The main problem is that you are near the door (So it’s cold and you are blocking new customers), in the way of people going to the toilet(s), and near the bar/counter area so you are in the way of the staff and customers leaving. All in all it made for a rather uncomfortable wait.

I would explain the layout of the place but it’s hard to describe. It’s not a “normal” shape, in that it’s not a square (Don’t forget you’re in a corner building) and it’s got walls blocking your view of the rest of the place so it’s hard to explain it. The décor is all very red and yellow. Very garish.

Once everybody had arrived (Bar one) we were shown to our table, which as luck would have it was right next to the food.

As this is one of those places where you serve yourself there was no waiting about to get your food (Plus one star).

As usual there was a bit of a scrum to get near the food but as it’s just all your mates and work colleagues who cares if you elbow someone in the ribs to get at the spare ribs?

I started off with the chicken and sweetcorn soup which is brought out to you for some reason (Every other place I’ve been like this you serve yourself). There wasn’t any delay in this as they must just have a vat of it out the back ready. The usual prawn crackers accompanied this. The soup was a little bland but okay. One thing I did like was that it was very hot and the crackers were nice and crispy.

Once this was over and done with it was onto the crispy duck pancakes. The duck wasn’t exactly crispy and the cucumber and spring onion were looking decidedly limp. The pancakes were a bit damp but the hoi sin was lovely (Bit hard to muck that up as it comes from a bottle).

Next it was the turn of the “finger food” such as ribs, chicken wings and prawn toast etc. The selection wasn’t huge (About 7/8 dishes). The ribs I had were quite fatty and gristly and the chicken wings appeared to have come from a very malnourished chicken.

Hoping that the mains would be better I quickly pushed my plate of ribs and chicken toes to one side. I’d been eyeing up the vermicelli noodles for a while by this point.

Fighting my way to the food yet again (This time not my mates but another rowdy bunch who had turned up) I grabbed a load of noodles and some meat dishes covered in so much sauce it was hard to identify what they were meant to be. The little signs over each food didn’t help as they appeared to be in the wrong place for everything.

Sitting down with my chosen, and I shall call it this in the loosest terms only, meal, I asked a few people if they could identify it. You guessed it; they couldn’t. Or if they could they didn’t want to tell me what it was. Either way after a few mouthfuls of it I decided to give it up as a bad job and pushed my plate away.

It was at this point that I noticed how slow the, oh so happy staff were. I hate comparing this to other restaurants of its type but it’s difficult to not draw comparisons when you’ve had great service in other places. Places like this live or die by the speed of their service. Here you only get the one (Plastic) plate. You have to wait on the staff clearing it before giving you another one. As such it can be a real pain if you want to move onto your next course but have to wait for a clear plate.

Once it was cleared I decided to avoid the mussels, which looked decidedly dodgy (I knew the vast amounts of alcohol I was about to consume would give me a bad enough stomach). Perusing the other food on offer the only other edible looking items were the rice (Fried, special with bits of meat and egg which I don’t like anyway) and the duck which I had already had.

As I didn’t fancy any of the accompaniments to the rice and I didn’t like the idea of plain rice I moved onto the desserts.

There was a huge selection of one flavour of jelly (The red one), tinned peaches and Tesco Soft Scoop value ice cream.

For your dessert your are supplied with minuscule metal bowls such as you often see kiddies desserts served in. I picked up the scoop, which was in some very murky looking water and tried to get some ice cream out which was frozen solid. The scoop having been immersed in water of a similar temperature didn’t help any.

As the meal drew to an end the bill was called for and once again the staff sprung into action and took a good 20 minutes to get back to us, looking decidedly annoyed if anyone dared to enquire as to the bills whereabouts.

Once the bill arrived we figured out what had taken them so long all night; they must have been flying the beer in from China and then asking NASA to sort out he bill and telling them it would be okay to bung a new shuttle onto the cost. We wouldn’t notice. It can be the only explanation for the cost.

Due to not having a website it’s hard for me to pin down the exact prices for this place. A lot seems to depend on the price of half starved chickens in Outer-Mongolia and the amount of rain that last fell in the Gobi desert. It seems to range from about £5.49 to about £10.99 (Extra if it’s Christmas, Easter, Diwali or the tooth fairy’s birthday).

I would have been able to overlook some of the worse aspects of this place (I.E. The food) had we received some service but as it was we had to hold back one of my senior colleagues after we queried the bill and they returned with an even higher figure than before.

As such I really can’t recommend this place at all. I can find no redeeming features and will not be going there willingly in the near or distant future.

Cheers,

Dean 

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