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| - My family had pretty bad food at Emerald Chinese restaurant and so we had to find a new casual Chinese dining place for our larger family get together. This was on our second stop of the GTA West tour of Chinese restaurants.
When we arrived for dim sum (and dinner 2 weeks later), the place was not so crowded but filled enough with people to cause us to wait a tiny bit. The exterior is an old boring looking strip mall with KFC off to one side. From the outside, it looks like a really small restaurant but the interior is otherwise. It's not as large as Emerald but it's certainly bigger than My Perfect Kitchen and Golden Fountain. The room is clean by Chinese restaurant standard and the decor is more updated compared to My Perfect Kitchen. I wouldn't call it upscale dining but it's upscale for a Chinese neighbourhood restaurant. As we waited, I perused through the menus and saw a lot of large banquet menus. The prices were aligned the higher end of GTA West Asian menus but it certainly wasn't nuts.
Our dim sum adventure started with the whizzing wait staff. Similar to most Chinese restaurants, they do their function at double speed and offer little anything else. No smiles, no chats.... just 'what do you want' and go go go. Dim sum here is the old school style on carts. It's nostalgic for me to see that. The constant yelling of their food choices over the Chinese banter is normal for this type of restaurant. Most of the individuals here are speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese but it's easy to order as you can just gesture towards them and you point away at what you want. For our table of 10, we got about 20 dim sum dishes, chow mein, and a fried rice.
For the dim sum, I wouldn't say it blew my socks off but I would say it's average. They came really hot out of the kitchen and cooked nicely. Nothing was heavy, dry, or ultra oily... it just wasn't flavourful for what it was. You'd have to add soy or chili oil to get the flavours going. We had the typical dumplings (ha gao, beef, siu mai, seafood and veg in clear dumpling wrap), rice wrapped in lotus leaf, rice rolls... there's lots of selection so you're not limited. The sizes of these dim sum was average as well so they're not tiny portions but certainly not the largest we've seen in GTA. We also got a few dessert items off the cart. Custard tart, sponge steamed cake, and black sesame rolls. Like the savoury dim sum, they weren't bad ... just not great. They didn't seem super fresh (then again, does any dessert option at dim sum seem fresh other than at the super high end places?) . The custard tart dough wasn't crispy or super sweet but the interior was a good soft mildly sweet chew. Black sesame roll had great flavour but a touch on the oily side. Sponge steamed cake is always bland but it was tall and large. For the price, I would say it's a touch expensive for GTA West.
As for dinner, the experience was far quieter and there was definitely less people in the restaurant. We got a set menu and an extra dish to feed our group of 9. The chicken was well executed. Crispy salted skin with moist interior and it wasn't ultra oily. The Chinese green vegetables (gai lan) was on the gigantic side and required some real teeth gnawing to get them into bite sized pieces. Flank beef wok seared with XO sauce was tasty and tender. Shrimp and scallops on bok choy was a bit disappointing. There was a lot of good vegetables but skimpy on the scallop pieces. I think we only had 3 for the entire dish. Pork stewed in a clay pot was a touch too salty... they od'd on the soy perhaps? but the addition of the mushrooms and vegetables in it was great on rice. Overall, our dinner experience was better than the dim sum. The ingredients seemed fresher and more flavourful. The sizes of the dishes were good but value wise, I wouldn't say it is great. The price tag for our meal was over $160 which is on the expensive side for Chinese dining. The price point is clearly in the high end but the service and overall food quality wasn't high end. It's somewhere slightly above average.
It's too bad that Mississauga is lacking in good Chinese restaurants. This one does fit into the middle nicely but I wish they either upped their quality and service or lowered their pricing. It's stuck in the bad spot of being over priced GTA West Chinese food.
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