Peach Valley is one of the veterans when it comes to the ever growing number of Chinese restaurants in Colombo. We wouldn’t call it authentic Chinese, but they’ve modified it in a way that we feel would suit most Sri Lankan palates.
Food
The menu at Peach Valley isn’t very much different from other contemporary Chinese restaurants, although they do offer a slightly larger selection, and most of the dishes come with pictures for reference, which we felt was a nice touch. They aren’t expensive, but they’re also not one of the cheaper joints either. You can expect to pay anywhere between Rs.900 – Rs. 1400 per head, depending on how many people you go with. Most of the dishes are priced in the range of Rs.500 – Rs.700 for small portions and Rs.750 – Rs.1300 for large.
We ordered the Shrimp & Chicken Fried Rice (Rs.750 for L), Sizzling Pork (Rs.1080 for L), Hot Butter Cuttlefish (Rs.1080 for L), Black Pepper Beef (Rs.750 for S) and Mixed Mushroom stir fry (Rs.480 for S). One thing we noted was, that all their rice dishes were priced very well and our one had a decent amount of shrimp and chicken in it, and was more than enough for 4 people.
Sizzling PorkThe Sizzling pork was the highlight of the dishes we ordered. It was prepared like a thick stir fry and had a good balance of flavours, with the right amount of seasoning. The pork was cooked well and we liked the fact that there weren’t many pieces of fat.
HBCThe HBC was also quite good. Not the best we’ve ever had, but still probably comparable to that of Flower Drum. The batter was crisp and slightly spicy (which we liked), the cuttlefish themselves were cooked well and not leathery.
Black Pepper BeefThe Black Pepper beef and Mixed Mushroom stir fry weren’t all that great. The sauce in the beef was overpoweringly peppery and we didn’t really get many other flavours. It didn’t really go well with the rest of the dishes either since it offset the balance. The Mushrooms had an entirely opposite problem where it was quite bland, and there wasn’t really much of a mix in it with most of it being button mushrooms with a few oyster mushrooms.
Ambience & Service
Not really much to talk about when it comes to ambience. The interior is quite dull with the exception of some statues and vases that are scattered around. It looked a lot better when they started out but it seems they’ve neglected it during the past few years. We even noticed a couple of holes in the tablecloths (like in the pic above) which isn’t cool.
Service was also nothing spectacular. The staff while friendly, wasn’t as attentive as we would have liked, but we did notice that they seemed to understaffed that night, with the waiters struggling to manage all the tables. There weren’t any napkins for the tables either so we had to manage with the paper serviettes.
Conclusion
We’d say Peach Valley still does a pretty good take on Sri Lankanized Chinese cuisine. It’s still a good place to go if you wanna have an easy going dinner in shorts and slippers. There’s definitely room for improvement when it comes to ambience and service, but we doubt that will change anytime soon.
