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| - The recipe for a bowl of these fish broth soup is simple: noodles, fresh fish broth, fresh ingredients and hopefully a bit of zing. That zing, especially in a fish broth place, is preferably fried fish skin, or some amazing meatballs/fishballs/seafood, etc.
Fish broth soup is supposedly the Chinese answer to the Ramen Shop invasion. While Ramen shops tend to have the edge if they do offer the hand-pulled Japanese style Ramen, what the fish broth needs, is a simple assortment of ingredients, and a fish broth to die for.
Perhaps, that's where Deer Garden makes their first mistake : the broth. In a short answer, it's not to die for. There's another place down Highway 7 that offers better fish broth with more taste. This broth here lacks taste. It's not bad, but it's not perfect.
Mistake # 2 : ingredients. At $8.25, you'd think there's more variety to the ingredients. When half the menu is vegetables, and not enough assortment of fish/meatballs, or even fish dumplings, that raises a bit of a flag inside me. The quantity doesn't help either. Beef brisket slices and fish slices seemed to be ok in terms of quantity, but vegetables, and meatballs, not so much. Also, offering Chinese broccoli to go with the noodles as one of the 2 ingredients is a little too much. $8.25....and you have to be so limiting in choices? No thanks.
Mistake # 3 : Speed. My list of ingredients up top highlights how to make one of these bowls of noodles. So, naturally, 3 bowls of these noodles, should take less than 10 minutes to arrive right? No. It took almost 20. I don't know what took so long, but it did.
Consolations? Yes. That one waitress who seems to know what she's doing. She's friendly, and she's helpful.
Worth going back? Not for that price tag. Just because you're a store that did relatively ok in Vancouver, doesn't mean you can make it big in Toronto with a Vancouver sticker on your window. No hate against Vancouverites, but we expected more.
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