| rev:text
| - Recently mentioned as #3 on Blog TO's list of 'Best Hakka Restaurants in Toronto', Tangerine opened its third location in east-end Scarborough, just 5-minutes from Highway 401.
We came to try it out one Friday night when I spotted a buy-1-get-1-free coupon on the website. One of the few open shops in a newly-built stripmall, eerily surrounded by bare stalls. The sleek interior is a bit cold and the tiny booth seats might not bode well for those who are heftier than the average Asian person.
The menu here is split according to appetizers, noodles and the kind of meat you want. There is still a large section of pure vegetable dishes, strangely, not listed on the online menu. Boggled by the choices, we were recommended the vegetarian Hakka noodles, which were excessively salty but otherwise quite good. I probably ate two-thirds of the entire plate.
Our second dish were vegetables and tofu in black bean sauce; the sauce was excessively starchy and relied too heavily on the soy sauces. Although the portions of vegetables were decent, the taste was akin to something you'd get in a Chinese restaurant in Middle-of-Nowhere, U.S.A. We picked out the tofu but wasn't tasty enough to pack up for leftovers.
The only dish that truly convince me that I might visit again were the dry* garlic and chili eggplant. The dish itself was large and the eggplant quite fresh and not overcooked. It was so tasty I had myself licking my lips! The bowls rice that accompanied our orders were quite generous, although my 90-year-old grandmother complained that the grains could have been made softer. To finish off our meal, I ordered dessert: two giant fried bananas with a enormous scope of ice cream, easily split between 2-3 people! At $4, it was pretty good deal.
Overall, the service here is quite fast and we got our dishes surprisingly quick. In regards to Vanessa's reviews about bad service, one must realize that Asian waiters are prided for being fast and efficient, not jovial. However, they are quite willing to give suggestions if you ask and can speak a few Chinese dialects. And once you are served, don't expect the waiters to come back ... unless you ask them too. The servers are often too busy handling the take-out orders in the evenings. By the time we left at 7:30 pm, there were four families sitting on the side waiting for their take-out orders.
A decent meal for a good price and fast service. I'm still not too sold on Hakka and don't see what the fuss is about. My grandmother claims that traditional Hakka is nothing like the basterdized version we find in Canada. As well, there are other forms of Asian cuisine that I find far more appealing since what you often get doesn't seem quite as divergent from a lot of Chinese dishes.
2.5/5 STARS
__________________________________________________
*Some dishes can be ordered 'dry' or 'wet'. Our waiter suggested 'dry', since it was more traditional.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)