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| - When I was having trouble finding Montreal's most famous Dim Sum restaurant, a la Maison Kum Fung, I ended up stumbling to this banquet style restaurant, which came recommended to me by some Chinatown locals.
It's located on the 2nd floor of a Chinatown mall, where it was an absolute zoo when I arrived. The stairs were filled with patrons all waiting for their number to be called and the crowd only got thicker with every stair step to the top. There was almost little-to-no room to move and getting to the front to collect a number felt like an impossibility. Not to mention I had 10 people with me and no reservation.
I some how made my way to the front, where I managed to play nice with the manager, who was busy handing out numbers to folks. A crowd of close to 100 became a crowd of no more than 15 in a matter of minutes, due to the diligent seat assigning from the hostess. Talk about a deceiving wait, I almost convinced the group to leave for another restaurant but was glad I stuck it out. My group was given a nice private room overlooking the restaurant and not a moment too soon, since we were all starving.
Service was a little overwhelmed and was not able to clean our table or get food to us right away. The staff was a little slow and getting attention to the room was marred by the fact they almost seemed too busy to tend to us. Eventually the Dim Sum ladies wheeled their carts into room and managed to serve us heaping plates of Dim Sum goodies. While most of them spoke some broken French / English, most of them had a tougher time speaking Cantonese than they did Mandarin.
Food portions here are ginormous. I've never seen Dim Sum in bulk like this, not even in the South where everything was fatter and greasier. The wu gok (fried taro dumplings) looked like they were the size of grenades and when stacked on top of eachother, looked like a hairy nest of eggs or unpeeled kiwi fruits. Ha Cheung (shrimp crepe) and Ha Gao (shrimp dumplings) were both also massive, to the point where it took only a few dishes to make everyone full. Zha Hai Kieu (fried crab claws) reminded me of jawbreakers and the Siu Mai was plenty thick with more meat than rice wrap.
Bigger isn't always better though, as most of the food was just adequate enough not to be mediocre. I prefered most of the cart items than fetching items from the long table in the banquet hall area. Most of those plates looked old and overly greasy.
Given the price and the portions, I think I could stomach another visit here in the future. The final bill was a modest one, which came out to be $120CAD for roughly 10 people. Surely the same Dim Sum rules still apply - come hungry, get a good spot, and arrive before noon. A reservation here probably doesn't hurt either, something of which I'll consider next time I bring a big group.
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