Memory of Szechuan in Reading

Friendly staff, nice food

Excellent restaurant. Well worth a visit.

Wonderful Superb food every time I visit. Very friendly staff.

We love the food these guys prepares every time delicious

September 2022First visit.Had the hotpot.Thoroughly enjoyed it, struggled to finish everything.Other diners plates looked to be of good quality too.£49 for two of us including 2 pints @ almost £11.Dont be put off by the drab exterior.We will be returning.

This is a nice restaurant to visit if you are craving for some Sichuan dish. Im tempted to try the hot pot next time Im there. Great place specially if you are a group of 4-10.

I was getting ready for bed and it filnaly arrived, cold. Order was wrong, god knows what it was but I was promptly sick 😫For what I got the price was extortionate, cant beleve I paid so much. Why didnt I read the reviews! Im sticking to Terry Lings from now on, best taste best value.

Everything is good and prepare with lot of care...definitely to try.

Amazing food and service. Very authentic. Keep this place going! It would be a huge shame to lose this from Reading.

Pretty unassuming Chinese restaurant near Reading station with a menu of Sichuan dishes, Cantonese dishes, Fish and Hot Pot. This time a friend and I had the hot pot and were pleasantly surprised, the soup was pretty good and we got a choice of 8 items from the menu to boil up. At about £22 per person, it’s relatively expensive but for a proper Chinese food fix I’d definitely recommend it. The waitress was friendly and there was a wide range of drinks as well as ingredients for a hot pot dipping sauce.I’d like to return and try out the Sichuan dishes.

Didnt get the food that we order &the service was very poor I dont think I will be going back

Had a delicious meal, food was amazing, freshly cooked and there was plenty on the plate I couldnt eat.Staff are friendly and not in your face all the time.Would highly recommend this restaurant.

Very disappointed. Maybe my 20th visit here ordering the same dish. Guo Bao Rou. It has drastically changed with the new chef, pork cut very thick and drowned in ketchup, tasting of very old cooking oil. Totally inedible, we ate half then left. The waitress who I know very well offered no form of discount or compensation whatsoever . Very poor customer management and please do change your cooking oils, they become very cancerous if re used too much.

Unusually very busy in restaurant and unfortunately not able to cope. Waited ages for food to come out. They were fine on other occasions so maybe one off.

Lovely place to eat, we went with friends and had the buffet, and I throughly enjoyed it. Would highly recommend eating here.

Not a great experience, service was poor and food a little cold.

We tried to have dinner like 5 times and always they are close to close the restaurant or they said that they don’t have enough staff to attend us and we are only 5 people. I don’t recommend that.

No matter from the perspective of diners or chefs, they are very average, not very authentic, but bland. I think this is disrespectful to the ingredients.

Gone down hill, all food came out cold.Its a shame, this place used to be great!

I wanna give you half a star only but there is only 1 star. Floor star were very unprofessional with us and they discriminated us because we were asian aswell. They were nice to other chinese customers but were rude to us. Very bery unprofessional, they need to learn how to serve all customers equally no discrimination.

It’s alright, not anywhere near as good as other Chinese Restaurants. Food was okay but nothing special, definitely not fresh as stated. Staff aren’t very attentive and you have to tell them multiple times when you want something. We had to ask the waitress about 5 times for something until she bought it to us. The staff who clean up are nice but the lady taking orders isn’t so friendly. Wouldn’t recommend but it’s not the worst.

This is phenomenal food and a great price. All you can eat freshly cooked food is under £20 and includes all the good stuff.The staff are a bit busy all the time but are polite and professional and attentive.Its much better to eat in than get take away as its more expensive and not as good after delivery.

Memory of Sichuan is a Sichuan Chinese restaurant in Reading town centre, that serves traditional main dishes and hotpot. Their mains are pretty authentic, with a particularly good value weekday lunch menu deal, but this week we went for their hotpot and was blown away by it. Its £22 per person for unlimited buffet (order 8 items at a time, we ordered 3 times).The main thing I loved about it was the variety of offerings available on their hotpot menu. You start off by choosing your soup base: plain, spicy (3 levels), pickled veg, or lamb bone soup base. You can half/half any of the soup bases except the lamb bone soup base. We went for half plain, half mildly spicy.In addition to the normal thin meat slices, they had unlimited offal, seafood, vegetables, tofu/vermicelli, and even rice/noodles/dumplings! Their portion sizes are huge, we made the mistake of ordering both beef slices and lamb slices and that was enough meat for the entire meal, we wanted more seafood. The fish, shelled prawns, and squid were all fantastic. And though you dont want to fill up on carbs, the fact that they have udon/noodles/ho fun/fried rice for free is something Ive not yet seen before at a hotpot buffet. I have to say that their homemade la mian stretched noodles were fantastic to finish off with, and the dumplings were pretty good too.Some detractors were that the hotpot burner was not very fast and they fill it up pretty deep, so the pot simmered rather than boiled. Twice they forgot our enoki mushrooms orders (or did they run out but didnt tell us?), and sometimes they run out of sesame paste dip on the side but you can just ask for them to refill it. But all in all its my favourite hotpot place in the UK now, and Ive been to plenty in London. Some other hotpot options in Reading include The Imperial Kitchen at Genting Casino and Kung Fu Kitchen, but Id be surprised if they can be better. £22 for such a variety of unlimited hotpot offerings is an incredible deal, and Id highly recommend it to anyone wanting a warm hearty meal this winter! :)

Food is very delicious but I would give the service 4 stars as it’s not up to the level of cooking.

My girlfriend is from Chengdu in the Sichuan province. The dishes we ordered were very representative of the region and give westerners like me a glimpse of their culinary world. Far better than Cantonese typical restaurant and takeaway dishes. The dishes were not fully authentic but was a nice tasting experience never the less.

Absolutely appalling with timing, they lie about your food preparation time and you will be there waiting for hours, every time you ask them how long it takes they say it is coming. If you would like to have 3 hr for your dinner, pbpy better place to go.

Tasty home cooked food, well served in a nice environment, we arrived too late for hotpot, but their extensive menu is worth perusing.

Walked past many times without going in. Hot pot was excellent and to my knowledge the only place in Reading you can get it. Reasonably priced and very filling - you only need the hotput buffet nothing else.

Eat in wasnt busy but they sent out quite a few deliveries. Was a set price of £18:90 I think but you could order what you wanted off of a 2 sided menu as long as you didnt waste it. Go properly hungry to make the most of it.

This was the second time we have eaten at this restaurant and it did not disappoint. We live in Oxford and came to Reading to do some errands. I really don’t understand the bad reviews at all. The food is amazing, by far the best we have ever had in the UK. It’s made fresh and comes hot and delicious. The staff are very nice and friendly. We never had the hotpot so don’t know what’s it’s like but the buffet is fantastic and I highly recommend it!

We came in on a Monday afternoon and it was very empty.We sat down and the menus were given to us. We planned to have a hot pot although it wasnt in the menu. We had to ask the waitress for a separate menu which we didnt know. There wasn’t really much hotpot broth choices. We ordered a few types of different meats, and when it came it was all frozen which was very disappointing. As no where on the menu was this stated and we had assumed everything would be fresh.We went for a mix of the spicy and vegetable broths, the spicy one just seemed to be a mixture of chillies and salt, it had no real soup flavouring other than heat and being extremely salty. The vegetable one wasn’t awful flavorwise but still not good. On the menu you can choose between ‘beef slices’ or ‘fresh beef slices’ which seem to get you the same frozen beef either way.

The food was fine, appetisers arrived a little cold. We waited over 40 minutes for our main. When we asked about them the waitress laughed and said oh sorry. We have 3 big groups in. Didnt really think this was a satisfactory or professional response. If youre in a big group then youll be served promptly. A couple or small group, be prepared for long periods of waiting between courses.

Not authentic Sichuan food I’d say, I ordered several times, not bad food . But this time I collected from the shop the chicken chow mien are soo oily as per the pic! I didn’t finish the noodles. The fried rice were not bad, flavoursome, but the rice sticks to each other, which cannot really b considered a sensible Stir Fried Rice.

Ate here tonight and, honestly, can not find a fault. The food was delicious and by far the best Chinese food we have had in a long time. The staff were friendly, the restaurant clean, fast and efficient and the food very reasonably priced. We will return and would encourage anyone else to try it also.

Ignore the negative reviews. I suspect they may have been left by competitors. This seems to be a very good restaurant. We are a beef hotpot, a kungpo chicken and some rice. It was delicious. The lady serving was very friendly. The place was clean. Will return.

Visited this restaurant on 02.07.19 around 7pm. The restaurant was not busy, I’d say out of the twenty (ishtables downstairs, five were taken and the rest were empty. Initial indications suggested the food would be good, however I was soon disappointed.My starter, ribs, which took a long time to arrive, were tasteless and I suspect had been frozen as the meat was dry. My main, duck with Chinese mushroom and bamboo shoots with fried rice, was a decent sized portion but yet again tasteless.Would not recommend, overpriced, tasteless, slow service.Such a let down.

Food was fantastic. Took my vegan niece to the to-order buffet and there were plenty of options for us both to choose from.Service and food was great will definitely come again.

if you are looking for hot pot, please avoid this place at all cost!! The actual price is higher than their website and all meat are frozen (it looks like they have been frozen for at least more than a few years!!!! The spicy base is absolutely a huge disappointment. An additional service fee was even charged and between two of us it was almost £50! its not worth the money, go somewhere else in London if you want hot pot! This place is nothing but a sham and you will be ripped off for sure. be wise with you money !

Noodles was extremely soft and texture like they overcook instant noodles in WATER for 2 hours. The marinated chicken in spicy sauce something like that, it got no flavour at all, the only flavour I could taste is the reused oil they used, taste exactly like the reused oil people use in Taiwan. If you are thinking, "oh the photos look good though" then go ahead and you will be the next one leaving one star.

Cant beat this place. Great food and at a very reasonable cost. The each as much as you like a me carte is perfect as gives option to try lots of different dishes but all cooked freshly and no drop in quality as per some of the standard buffet type places. The regulars always seem to be on the vast thick menu rather than the EAMAYL version....One day Ill get the courage to opt for one of the authentic Chinese dishes instead of the reg westernized stuff we all know and love.

Tasty and good value. Sure this place isnt going to win any awards for its décor, it basic at best, but it has a genuine feel and has a good following. We had the a la carte all you can eat. The soups were tasty and hot, probably a bit large which could be an appetite/revenue tactic but we didnt mind as they were good. Other hits were the ribs and the smoked chicken. The drinks are a bit on the expensive side but the food is fairly priced.

I arrived at about 12.30 on a rather cold day at the end of October. After being shown to my table and taking off my coat, I noticed it wasnt very warm; I checked the radiator behind me, and it was cold. There were few other people in this large room, so service was good. I was offered an a la carte and also an extensive lunch-time menu offering two courses for £8.90, which I chose. The main courses were illustrated, but there was no indication of how hot they were . Now, I associate Szechuan food with the hot and spicy, so I asked the Chinese waitress (she came from near Hong Kongto guide me to such a dish. She said most of the dishes were mild "for the English taste" (!), but recommended a pork dish. The other choice was between a soft drink or a soup. I chose the crab and sweetcorn soup. The main meal was what I would call mild. Both courses were generous in quantity and tasty however. I downed them with a glass of the house white wine, which was also good if a little pricey. On the whole a satisfying meal for a restaurant in the middle of town, about a 10 min walk from the train station.

This place is a good little spot in town and not too crowded. There were 3 of us and we got the hot pot. The food was very good, however I do wish the staff communicated which dishes were no longer available a bit better.

Staff are kind but there were some communication issue. Although food was good and it was a fine meal. Price wise it is not that cheap.

It used to be five stars, the buffet was fantastic, on the last couple of visits it appears as though the restaurant are wanting to move away from the all you can eat buffet clientele it now appears to focus on the main menu. I had the impression that the waiting staffs attitude changed once we asked for the buffet menu. The buffet menu also appears to have been put on a diet and has been trimmed down, the quality has also suffered. Its a shame as it was the best all you can eat restaurants in Reading.

Shocking level of service. Two of us popped in at 21.00. Place was reasonably quiet apart from a large party of younger Far East lads. Ordered two starters along with three main meals, rice and noodles. Starters were very nice but then the problems started. Got 1 main and the noodles, no sign of other meals. Munchies took over and we started on them. Nearly finished when rice arrived and were promised the two other mains in 5 mins. That would have been circa 25 mins since the 1st main and noodles came. Staff were far too busy serving the large party and basically did not want to know. Did pay for what we had eaten then left.

Wish I read the reviews before going in but lesson learnt... Waitress not writing down the order does not bother me if she can remember... but we received different starters to which we ordered. I did not complain trying to have a nice quiet dinner with my boyfriend. Waitress serving us was more than unpleasant (other staff who cleaned up the table at the end were nice). Food served was cold and mediocre in taste. After getting the bill for two small starters, two mediocre mains, glass of coke and a glass of water my boyfriend was speechless and did not want me to see it. Ridiculous... goodbye to over 50GBP!!!!!

Waited 20mins to be served our drinks. The couple next to us got there before us and still hadnt been served their drink order yet. I had asked for a drink from the bar and didnt receive that until the main was on the table.The starter had arrived. When the place was Furama the portion size was enough to share. This. Was Not. But I must say it was actually really nice.By this time another couple had came and was seated next to us. They had waited 10mins before someone had asked them their order and the woman clearly let them know that they hadnt even been offered a menu!When we got our main we couldnt even eat the rice portion. It was clearly plain boiled rice with what tasted like frozen prawns just added. ZERO TASTE OR FLAVOURWas so disappointed

Nice restaurant, good food, good service. Come here for good value, its unlikely to impress. Came here for Valentines Day 2014. The all-you-can-eat-menu was the only option, a little expensive at £17.50 but quality of food was very high and its not a buffet. The waitress brings you all the starters you can eat, then all the mains you can eat in a civilised fashion :desserts/coffee not included. Make sure youre hungry if you go for the all-you-can-eat, our bill came to £42 but Ive never been so full in all my life, worth it!

This is the worst Chinese restaurant ever!!! Today, when I paid the bill, the cashier randomly charge me 3 pounds more. The dish that I ordered was 5.5 pounds on menu, but she wanted to charge me 8.5 pounds. In addition, their attitudes towards me are awful. Last but not least, they dont allow one person to eat buffet, which is the first time I have ever heard. What a ridiculous policy! I think they just focus on profits, which makes me doubt their food quality???