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| - I am a Hong Kong born Chinese, lived in downtown TO for the past 20 years and House of Gourmet is my favourite regular joint for fair priced and authentic Cantonese foods.
Here, the menu is extensive with hundreds of variations of noodles and rice dishes. I may not have tried every single item on the menu but I have confidence that 1) your dish will be tasty and 2) the portion will be generous here. In fact, most rice and dry noodle dishes I get here are at least 2 meals for me; always have leftover for dinner or lunch the next day.
I am a noodle person and I usually go for soup noodles with beef brisket or some type of wanton/dumplings by default when I want a cheap and quick meal. Other things I normally order include rice with BBQ pork or roast pork, congee of some kind with fried breadstick/donut, any fried rice or egg noodle dishes, fried rice (I like the Malaysian seafood fried rice), fried Singaporean turnip/parsnip cake. The stuff on their lunch and dinner specials (displayed on your table) is of great value and pretty good too. From those menus, I liked the 'Portuguese' (coconut curry sauce) chicken, baked rice, any 'steak' items (I like mine cooked to medium rare). With these specials, you get the option of being served on rice or plain spaghetti, cream (chowder) soup or vegetable soup, and tea or coffee. I don't recommend tea or coffee as actually, they both taste pretty gross :) Regular Chinese tea you get when you sit down is much better. Otherwise, you can add $1 and pick any cold special drink from the menu e.g. Iced red bean coconut milk drink. Lobsters is always good too. Oh, and French toast for afternoon snack too. Like I said, most things are pretty good here. One thing I probably won't order is the BBQ duck as although it's taste and smells nice, I find there's not a lot of meat on these guys generally, more fat and skin than meat. I also won't recommend the baked tenderloin served with 'red sauce' as it's a oddly sweet ketchup sauce, unless that sounds good to you.
Also the service is good here. Although it gets pretty loud here with the staff always yelling out orders and to each other re. tasks to be done and rushing around quickly to get things done, each one of them is nice when you wave them down to take an order. I never feel any attitude and hostility like I feel at some other places (like King's Noodles on Dundas, I find the servers there grouchy and scary to talk too). Service is generally super quick (unless you order something like baked rice which take a bit longer to bake). Otherwise, it's probably an honest kitchen mistake and you can gently remind them and they will follow up immediately.
So generally, it's like a Chinese diner, good comfort Chinese food, fair and quick service, reasonable prices and portions. It's a great place considering the options here in the downtown TO area. I also like eating here because it's rather large, plenty of seatings, well-lit, well air-conditioned in the summer and well ventilated. They also recently renovated.
I highly recommend this place for casual and authentic Cantonese food in downtown TO or in Chinatown.
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