Mandarin Garden

The Mandarin Garden is a family-run Chinese restaurant and takeaway on South Tay Street, the residential-and-restaurant slope that runs up from Nethergate into the Westport pub triangle. It's a proper sit-down dining room rather than a takeaway-counter shop, working a six-day week and trading from midday through to mid-evening rather than the late-night kebab-shop hours of the nearby Westport streets. The kitchen pulls dishes across the Peking, Cantonese and Szechuan regions on a long card — sweet-and-sour, curry, satay, black-bean mains, beancurd and seasonal vegetable plates on the vegetarian side, with house specials and a banquet set-menu for larger bookings. Reservations are taken. Aggregated reviewer comment is consistently positive on the cooking — authentic flavours, friendly attentive service — with the usual note that the dining-room decor is dated rather than the more contemporary look of the newer Chinese rooms in town. A long-running West End fixture and one of the older Chinese restaurants in central Dundee.