Serendipity

Last night Keith and I were looking forward to a meal out that we'd booked months ago with a Groupon offer - to an Italian Bistro at the other side of Hull. We got showered and ready in good time to leave the house at 7.20 - given that it's a 25minute drive across to Chanterlands Avenue (where Ciao Bistro) is located. Surprisingly for us, the drive across town was remarkably smooth and we arrived on Chants Ave at 7.36pm (I always remember times precisely, it's part of my obsession for lists etc I think) so we were thinking we'd be too early. However, as we approached the venue, we started to realise that we may struggle to find a parking place. 25 minutes later, and two years' worth of screaming and shouting at each other in response to this, we KNEW we were going to have to forego our much-anticipated meal.  Neither of us could believe that there was literally nowhere to park - all the available spaces on the main avenue were taken as well as every inch of space in all the side streets on both sides of the avenue - even along the main road leading up to Chants Ave itself. We decided to abandon the idea so Keith waited outside in the car (with the engine running, he was parked at the edge of a bus stop - the only spare strip of road available at that time) and I went in to explain the situation. "No, I'm not surprised" said the manager when I told him we'd spent 25 minutes driving around looking for a parking spot, "there's a party of four in the corner who were driving around for 40 minutes before they found anywhere. Would you like to make another booking?" "Well, yes, but can you recommend a night when it won't be this bad for parking?" I replied, not hopefully.  "Any night, really, it's just that it's the football tonight so it's really busy"  DOH!!!

That's the trouble with not being remotely interested in football - I never know when our team in Hull are playing, and last night was even worse, apparently, because they were playing a team from Leeds. I have no idea what that means, but it must be important to bring all that extra traffic out in order to try and spoil our evening out!

Anyway, once we'd re-booked, we decided to try somewhere else instead. We were thinking of just going home and raiding the freezer, but because we'd got dressed up (Keith even had his new jeans on) we drove into Cottingham and parked up near a place we thought would be open. Wrong. "Purple Cow" is only open on certain nights - it's mainly used as a cafe during the day, but we've been before when they had a tapas evening and thoroughly enjoyed it! Our problem is we don't go into town or out for meals enough to really have a good knowledge of what's open when and how good it is! So we started to walk back into the centre of Cottingham instead and Keith just happened to spot a neon sign light up in an otherwise empty shop window - advertising "Woksoever". We turned into an arcade and at the end was a chinese restaurant.

We opted for the "allyoucan eat" menu - which was £14.99 each and literally as many dishes, from the starter, main or side dish menu shown here as you liked. We aren't big eaters, so just chose a starter and a main dish each, with rice to accompany it - next time, we will probably just order a selection of starters, however!

I had the sate vegetable skewer for starters, Keith opted for the Chilli Spicy Salted Chicken Wings and we both thought they were delicious. We even enjoyed the bowl of prawn crackers with dipping sauce that arrived before the starters, so knew we were onto a winner here.

For our main dish, we had the Chicken in a Special Satay Sauce with egg fried rice (me) and Chicken Wokever Curry with egg fried rice (Keith). I actually finished all mine - Keith struggled a bit but only left a bit of rice to be fair - and he'd had 4 chicken wings to start with, which is more than a couple of sticks of vegetable, in terms of fulfilment.

The service was speedy, friendly, everything was immaculately clean and the atmosphere was great. We would recommend this place to anyone who (like us, up to last night) has not yet been. Thanks to Hull City for making what we thought would be a really crappy night turn out to be a lovely one instead!