Competition is fierce between dim sum restaurants in Richmond Hill and Markham. Diners there are unforgiving so if a restaurant survives a few years with long queues, it’s probably a good sign. Yang’s Fine Chinese Cuisine been around for more than a decade and is still popular for its dim sum. It would be even more popular if it was located in a more accessible location like other restaurants along Highway 7.
Macau is a minor oddity of China. It was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years and was only reunified with China in 1999. As such, there are some influences from Portugal and its other colonies, but the feel is unmistakably Southern Chinese.
The most famous specialty is pastéis de nata (egg tarts). As for the next most famous dish, it’s likely unknown to the rest of the world. My vote goes to galinha à Africana (African chicken): roasted and covered with a piri piri and peanut butter sauce. It’s not actually African but an amalgamation of Central and Southern African ingredients.
Woodstone Eatery is one of the few Macanese restaurants in the Toronto region. It feels like a Hong Kong cha chan teng (茶餐廳; Westernized Chinese cafe) with Macanese items. Still, it’s a splendid choice with good cooking and down-to-earth prices.
This humble restaurant in a nondescript plaza doesn’t even have a website, but is thriving through word-of-mouth. The draw is their authentic and tasty Sichuan food.
Sichuan cuisine is the second most prevalent Chinese cuisine in the world, after Cantonese. It’s no exception in Toronto. Many Chinese restaurants here have a token Sichuan dish or two. The cuisine’s signature ingredient is Sichuan peppercorns, which has a numbing effect on the tongue. It might be a good thing because it distracts from the burn from the thick layers of chilli oil and slew of dried chillies.
Sichuan dishes are easy to make but hard to do well, so one has to travel out of the Toronto core to get good Sichuanese food. The best places are cheap and cheerful establishments, like Szechuan Noodle Bowl.
Toronto has bountiful dim sum at all price points. Quality is comparable or better than Hong Kong. At the high-end, there are over a dozen restaurants that will compete for your dollar. By high-end, I mean luxury ingredients like lobster, truffles, foie gras, etc. Surprisingly, prices are not that stratospheric. The average plate at these restaurants range from $5.65 to $11.30 (after tax). In the past, it was common to have “early bird” discounts for diners that show up before 9am. It’s rare to see that these days but you can still get discounts (usually) by paying with cash.
Casa Imperial has the best setting amongst its competitors. It’s in a mid-19th-century heritage house, originally the Hood-Gough House. Think chandeliers, oil paintings, and fine china. It’s faux-glam but consumers love it for its perceived elegance. For pandemic dining, seating has moved outdoors and so has the dining finery. Even the tents are a step above the average restaurant. Sturdy and matched for an establishment of this calibre.
Mandarin is known amongst Toronto residents for their all-you-can-eat buffet, with vaguely Chinese dishes and mishmash of dishes like sushi and pizza. Long-time Torontonians still bemoan the loss of crab legs from the line-up. Despite online criticisms, food quality is decent and is perhaps the best place to try Canadian-Chinese food. People don’t go there just for the food. Nostalgia plays a factor too. Mandarin prides itself as a family restaurant and surely many a celebratory meal went down at its restaurants.
I was curious about how Mandarin was doing at a time when buffets are not allowed to operate. They held back during the initial months of the pandemic but quickly pivoted to takeout. Is there still a reason to patronize Mandarin when they have lost their main value proposition? Thankfully, the answer is yes.
For this review, I went to the closest Mandarin downtown, at Yonge and Eglinton.
Continue reading “Mandarin (Yonge and Eglinton, takeout edition)”
For some reason, four specialists of crossing-the-bridge noodles have opened withing walking distance of one another in the past few years. They are centred in downtown Chinatown. I don’t quite understand the appeal of this dish but apparently the market is large enough to sustain them all. So, I decided to go on a taste test.
This review was done over the course of a year because of interruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a dish that has to be eaten on-premise for a fair assessment.
Crossing-the-bridge noodles (过桥米线; guoqiao mixian) gets its unusual name from a fable about a devoted wife bringing her husband these noodles. She had to cross a bridge to reach him, hence the name. Traditionally, the soup has a thick layer of oil to keep it warm. Restaurants in Toronto (and most in China) don’t bother with that because no one is doing any lengthy bridge crossings.
This dish originates from Yunnan province in Southwest China and is the representative dish. The novelty lies with diners quickly tossing raw ingredients in the boiling soup just after it is served. It’s an interactive affair. Deluxe versions can be an impressive feast. Other than that, it tastes like regular soup noodles.
I was remarkably underwhelmed by the everyday versions sold in Yunnan. It’s as sad as it looks.
Enterprising Chinese from outside Yunnan spiffed up this ancient dish and packaged it for the modern market. It now comes with an earthenware pot and better presented ingredients. This is the style used by Toronto restaurants.
Continue reading “Battle of crossing-the-bridge noodles in downtown Toronto”
Lai Wah Heen is the grand dame of luxury dim sum, incorporating ingredients like lobster and caviar since the 1990s. It won critical acclaim but standards went downhill for a long time before rising again. Today, it’s still a decent place to try high-end dim sum if you don’t want to make the trip to Richmond Hill and Markham.
Online reviews are harsh, mainly because the price doesn’t meet expectations. Indeed, some items like char siu bao (barbecued pork buns) don’t taste that all different from average restaurants but are priced higher. The trick is to select the right things. Research on their specialties beforehand and get the unique ones. Then, the experience won’t be as bad as detractors claim.
Guangxi (广西) is a relatively poor province in China and is known more for its scenery than its food. The cuisine is really peasant food. There are a handful of specialties in the big cities but there are no regional dishes. Perhaps that’s why there are so few Guangxi restaurants, even within China.
Toronto is blessed to have a Guangxi restaurant that offers the representative noodle dishes of the province. Taste of Guang Xi started at First Markham Place and opened a branch in downtown Chinatown a few months ago. I stopped by the downtown branch for this review.
The most popular dish here is luo si fen (螺蛳粉; river snail rice noodle). This noodle soup dish hails from the city of Liuzhou (柳州). It’s rare to find a fresh version outside of Guangxi and most Chinese consume the pre-packaged version. There is no visible snail meat but rest assured that there are snails. Entire snails are simmered in the broth until the meat disintegrates and the shell remains are left in the pot. You can’t really taste the snails anyway with all the spices.
