Dad's Kitchen

After eating takeaways as a Nottingham student for more than two years, the choices can get limited: pizza, kebab, and Chinese are the usual ones.
So when I discovered Dad’s Kitchen, which specialises in Jamaican cuisine, I was intrigued. Although, they don’t open as late as the likes of Dino’s and Mario’s etc., they have a variable selection of dishes and their customer-service is very friendly.
I had the jerk chicken and plantain, which is a pretty good combination, seeing as there is a lot of sauce that goes with the jerk chicken. The sauce was sweet but savoury and made for a good dip for the plantain.

Arena Kebab

I've ordered from Arena Kebab Nottingham twice. The first time I ordered I got a Doner Kebab and chicken wings. The wings were large and tasty and the doner kebab (although pricy) was very large and the Naan bread was just right. The bread held strong and I didn't find myself playing a balancing act trying to make sure the kebab meat didn't fall too heavily on one side or the other. My friend got the mixed tikka chicken and doner meat kebab and he loved his. The week after we were with another friend and we decided to get Arena again. This time the naan bread was too dry, there was not enough meat in the kebabs (we ordered chicken kebabs this time) and the chicken our friend ordered was too plain. In short it's just like any other kebab shop, you sometimes get a good kebab and sometimes a bad one.

Planet Pizza 3

Planet Pizza 3 (or the third… I really don’t know/care) is another of many kebab/pizza/sfc take-aways located in Nottingham. The one thing they have that sets them apart from the rest is that they do have stuffed crust pizzas, at your regular kebab shop pizza price. Could this be the cheaper solution to getting an expensive (yet frankly considerably better) stuffed crust pizza at Pizza Hut or Dominos, you ask? Well, nearly. Their pizza stuffed crust is effectively stuffed with cheese but a rather sad amount that can just be tasted. I must say their pizzas are a lot better than all your other kebab shop pizzas and clearly their chef used to work at pizza hut. But it’s not quite there. Cheap alternative: Yes. Replacement: No. Enough said.

Antalya Nottingham

If you are tired of your under-average kebabs (See below: Luigi’s) and want to tuck into some real high quality Turkish food then its best you check out Antalya in Nottingham. This traditional Turkish restaurant actually has two parts. One: an elegant dine-in setting with large seating areas for dinners and parties. The second: A simple yet very tasty take away. The food is of amazing quality and authenticity thus restaurant has a recurring clientele and I can see why. My biggest criticism towards Antalya is that it’s a very dark restaurant as the lighting is quite poor and the windows are always covered. I suppose for a romantic dinner with a date this would be nice but generally the darkness is not very atmospheric. I should mention that being quite a classy restaurant the price range follows suit and if you are planning to eat there do expect to pay at least £15 a head. All in all a good restaurant and a must try when in Nottingham.

The Lemon Tree Nottingham

We ordered from the Lemon Tree a week ago and all our stomachs said after we finished was "Meh!". The Lemon Tree gave us the most mediocre chinese take-away meal we have had in a while. Let's start course by course.

Appetizers: Prawn Crackers.
The prawn crackers were more like prawn sloppy joes as they were so oily I could feel the pimples wanting to come out by just touching them. To think prawn crackers are so easy to make...

Appetizer: Chicken wings
We got the salt and spicy chicken wings and well... actually they were really good and cheap too at £2.50 they are the cheapest wings you can get around and are actually really good value for money.

Main course: Beef Fried Rice
Now this was the saddest excuse i've ever seen for beef fried rice from a chinese restaurant. normally Beef Fried Rice is really lovely with mixed vegetables and with the lovely soy sauce and beef juice in the rice but not this one. They just had fried beef on some egg fried rice... with very little egg. Really a disappointment.

Main course: Chicken Curry w/ Egg Fried Rice
This was not worth the money paid for it. One would have thought it would only pass of as a school lunch. Not enough chicken and too many mushrooms. The taste of the actual curry sauce was quite bland. The fried rice was pretty pathetic: little flavour with hardly any egg. Very underwhelming.

Capocci Nottingham - An Insult to Italian, Spanish and Mexican Cuisine.

The review for this restaurant will be particularly accurate. Why? Because I have made the awful mistake of not only eating in this terrible restaurant once but twice.

The first time I went there I was with three girls I had met at a concert, and they were the ones that chose to go there, so really who was gonna say "no", right? We ordered the paella and two of the different pastas and a chicken steak . I know what good paella is and what Capocci has is simply yellow rice with vegetables (and a tiny bit of seafood), it tasted just like the frozen paella you get at cheap supermarkets!! As for the pastas, the pasta was way overcooked and it tasted more like eating baby food than anything else. The chicken steak was probably the best dish and even so it was pretty weak, it was way overcooked and the seasoning had not gone through so it tasted like paper.

The second time I went there was with a friend that wanted to know what mexican food tasted like. We passed by and despite me telling him how awful my last encounter with this restaurant was he insisted on going in . We ordered the nachos and let me tell you, this was the weakest excuse for nachos I had ever seen. They simply got cheap nachos and poured the matching salsa sauce with some beans and cheap supermarket brand cheese on it. The worst part was they left it in the oven too long so the nachos were burnt and it took ages to arrive.

So really, if you're in Nottingham and want Spanish, Mexican or Italian Capocci is NOT the place to go!

Just 4 Students / Luigi's - A bad takeaway with a new name

They were over 20 minutes late and that was only because we had to give their driver a step by step instructional guide as to how to navigate around the university. This would have been somewhat understandable had the restaurant been located far away from the University but the thing is it is located in Beeston, Right next to the university!! This is ridiculous, you would expect a local driver to know his way around two areas of Nottingham: the city centre and the University of Nottingham (which really, is all Nottingham is known for). To top that off they gave us the wrong food, and it wasn't a pleasant mistake like getting a pepperoni pizza instead of a margherita, no, they gave us some cold chicken wings and a giant box containing a random menagerie of kebab shop items. They clearly had just stuffed whatever was left over at the end of the day into that box and thought they could get away with it. There was burger meat, salad, kebab meat, a chicken wing (admittedly huge, and looked quite tasty) chips all messily stuffed into a very thin chicken box. I would like to meet the person who would choose such a random assortment of food. Just 4 Students, you have been found out as just a rebrand of Luigi (the driver told us)!!! The actual quality of the kebabs that we ordered wasn't that great either. It was just bread and meat. Frickin ridiculous. Get some proper cooks! Goes to show, Luigi's had to change their name to fool students into buying their food again. What a joke...
Everyone knows that Luigi never had anything on Mario, so what convinced you that things would be different. You didn't even deserve a 1 star rating, that's how bad you were. Disgrace!!!