I’ve written about the Curry Club before and I’ve written about Imperial China before and tonight the two have been combined to create a night that will go down in history as Curry-oke night. As the Curry Club’s traditional MO is to, well as the name indicates, find a nice curry house to explore a visit to Imperial China seemed a bit odd. I guess after over 50 Curry Club events it was time for a change.

A surprisingly large number of people seemed up for this outing (with over 30 expressing an interest) though as expected by the time tonight arrived we lost a few including Jules (“sick”) and Jenny (“celebrating passing her driving test”.) No matter, we still had a decent turn out and managed to fill the three tables in our private karaoke room.

By the time we got to Imperial China at around 7pm I was surprised to find that the other karaoke rooms were already in full swing and full voice! Our fellow karaokers included companies such as Disney and Mitsui and I think its fair to say recoding artists in the making they were not. Ha ha. Interestingly Imperial China have not opted to sound proof any of the rooms, or it didn’t seem that way, as the music and singing was very loud in the corridors indeed. It made for a good energetic atmosphere though.

The food

Before we could get into the singing or wailing or whatever you choose to call it we first had to get down some nosh and, for those requiring it, a bit of dutch courage. Though lets face it the alcohol was going to flow irrespective of whether or not people were nervous about the karaoke! The set menu course we’d gone for offered the following:

Mixed Hors D’oeuvres. They could have tried to make the presentation a bit nicer.
Aromatic Crispy Duck served with Pancakes	Unfortunately no photo was taken of this but the plate for the duck was huuuge
Deep Fried Squid with Pepper together with Spicy Prawns, Sweet & Sour Pork, Lemon Chicken, Fried Scallop with Broccoli, Fried Beef with Double Mushrooms, Fried Lamb with Ginger & Spring Onion, Fried Rice, Fried Noodle

The food was all fairly tasty and good generous portions. Unfortunately our table had no lazy suzy so it was a bit hard for everyone to get access to all the dishes easily. Still we managed and I think seriously over-ate. The service was a little slap dash and for a place like Imperial China a bit disappointing. Maybe they were trying to balance availability of staff with giving the groups in the rooms privacy. Still, it didn’t seem to difficult to keep the flow of wine bottles constant.

The songs

Supposedly singing tonight was on a strictly volunteer only basis so to aid that a hat went around and people could write down what song they wanted to sing and then when it was drawn out of the hat it would be their time to shine. This system worked fairly well as a lot of people seemed happy to get up and make a fool of themselves. When I say make a fool of themselves I’m not knocking their ability (or inability for the most part) to sing but more the fact that some people when they got mics in their hands just were out of control. From all this karaoke, I’ve realized, is not about having a great voice but about being an entertainer so no one cares if you’ve got a crap voice, only that you are good at hamming or camping things up.

Sandra and I really really really didn’t want to get up and sing but unfortunately got dragged up to do a spice girls number with Pauline, Kelly and Ali:

I was not impressed but once we got up there it wasn’t so bad as most people, as everyone had done all night, were singing and dancing along with us anyway.

All good things must come to an end eventually and after a long medley of Beatles songs, where everyone got very emotional and touchy-feely it seems (some more than others!), it was time for the night to end.

Overall it was a fun night though I think I will take care next time not to sit under the speakers. My ears are still ringing!