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| - I'm pretty much as far as a vegetarian as you can get without mainlining bacon fat into my veins - but m'lady be a vegetarian and I wanted dim sum in Markham, so Graceful was the compromise.
I'm treating this place as fairly as possible for what it is and in comparison to other vegetarian places I've been to - it's pretty middle of the road. I'm not sure if it's the Buddhist influence, but the food is pretty bland.
If you've tried Chinese 'faux' meats before, you may be impressed with their efforts to approximate the full meat experience - but the food was a lot better and more creative at places like Joe Yee (now closed)
The two of us ordered 8 dim sum dishes - the total came to $40 with tax and tip ($3 - $5 per dish) and we were stuffed, but neither of us were satisfied. Pretty pricey compared to normal dim sum, but I guess they are serving a niche market.
The har gow ('shrimp dumpling') was extremely thick skinned and was starchy - 'faux' filling notwithstanding, this was off to a bad start. The sui mai ('pork meatball') had an odd sticky texture. Xiao long bao ('Shanghai soup dumpling') are usually sucky even at a regular dim sum places (you really have to go to a good specialist for this) -- but the XLB here was bad even by dim sum XLB standards - had no soupy or savoury element at all, just a slight ginger hit. I won't have been able to guess they were try to imitate XLB if I ate it blind.
The passable items were the smoked 'duck' which bean curd wrapped veggies with a strong taste of smoke - not like duck at all, but at least it was interesting. And the deep-fried items were not bad - but I noticed most Chinese vegetarian places do a good job of faking deep-friend things - so this might be inherent.
Oddly, the best thing we had the chicken nugget. If you fed this to most people and didn't tell them, they would probably think they were eating a pretty good chicken nugget from the freezer section at a grocery store. So - I guess this was good?
This was my first time having faux meat dim sum, and it was pretty bland. Even when accounting for the inherent difficulties of attempting vegetarian dim sum - things like thick dumpling skins are big mistakes. While the most of dim sum looked the part, many of the textures/tastes were very off.
I will say that the service was excellent and it's hard to slam people for trying something as ambitious as this. But like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun... on wings made of dyed, reshaped and poorly flavoured tofu.
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