I haven’t had a take out Chinese meal since the wonderful Hue Wei closed a few years ago. I do like making my ‘fakeaway’ meals like hoisin duck, beef in black bean sauce and special fried rice, but it’s a lot of work. Sometimes you just want a dirty takeaway. I recently found out about Simply Chinese in Dronfield from the Sheffield Gluten Free Facebook group, which is a brilliant hive mind for all things GF in Sheffield. There isn’t a website, but one very helpful person has put up a menu with the GF items circled on the Facebook group, which you’ll find if you search for Simply Chinese.

So, Simply Chinese gets a lot of very favourable reviews on the Facebook group, which is very encouraging. But there’s also an issue, which is that they only have 1 star for hygiene – not great! However, on doing a bit of research, speaking to the staff myself and looking at the place, it seems the reason is mainly due to the age and state of the building rather than the hygiene of the cooking. Having satisfied ourselves that it had lots of recommendations, we decided to risk it.

There is a lot marked gluten free on the menu, and even more that they can make gluten free, so there was plenty to choose from. As there were a few of us, we went fairly large on the order. We had deep fried squid and crispy seaweed as a starter, then for main course, crispy pork sweet and sour, beef with ginger and spring onions, stir fried broccoli with garlic, chicken in Cantonese sauce, and duck with plum sauce. We tried the Char Siu fried rice as well as the regular egg fried.

I’ll be honest, we enjoyed it a lot, but it wasn’t gourmet by any stretch of the imagination. The crispy sweet and sour was brilliant and I loved the seaweed, but I think they must have put the broccoli in garlic on to cook at lunchtime! I did enjoy the beef with ginger and spring onions, less so the chicken in Cantonese sauce.

There’s still plenty on the menu I’d like to try like crispy aubergine in Szechuan sauce, crispy chicken in lemon sauce (an old fave), and Peking spare ribs, amongst other things. So we’ll definitely go back. It’s great to know that Chinese takeaway is once more an option!

Simply Chinese
The Rock, 7 Chesterfield Road, Dronfield S18 2XA