Another Winterlicious meal, another opportunity to eat at a Susur Lee restaurant. And in the case of Luckee, it epitomizes that culinary world's cliche word "elevated" as applied to dim sum (and also a variation of cliche words used in Chinese restaurant names--feel free to ask me about it).
Heck, I even caught sight of the local celebrity chef himself on my way out--he was at the bar chatting with some folks. Luckee you.
The restaurant is divided into two areas: a very spacious lounge and bar that also serves the hotel it is in, and the dining room. Both with furniture choices and interior design evocative of old midcentury classic Chinese banquet hall-style restaurants (the work of wife Brenda Bent and her design firm, as with Lee's other Toronto restaurants), and yet modern and sexy. There is another bar area I wish I knew of earlier, where you can eat as you watch the kitchen staff at work from behind a glass wall, whilst stacks of dim sum bamboo steamer baskets pile up. Luckee you.
As loud chillout house music blares away and the light goes from dim to near-pitch-dark to dim again from time to time (do the staff have a habit of bumping into light switches or are they really trying for a nightclub ambiance?), it is impossible to overlook what you're getting into here: Susur Lee's take on dim sum and other Chinese dishes, at celebrity chef's prices--but only hints of the usual fusion influences of Lee. The stuff in the dim sum menu hovers around a median charge of $9, while meat and seafood dishes command at least $20. How Luckee.
The Winterlicious 2015 menu ($35) features some stuff from the usual menu and some new dishes too. The 'Luckee Duck'--Lee's version of the Peking duck--was at the right kind of soft and crispy, although the Singaporean Curry Noodles, which came unknowingly wrapped pita-style, sadly lacked that spicy curry punch I love about Singapore noodles like what you get at your usual Chinese mall food court stall lah.
We went off-course and tried their ha gow and siu mai ($9's), because what the hell is dim sum without those two? Both were... ah, very indescribably interesting, with the use of ingredients and flavours that makes them that (here's that word again) elevated kind of dim sum experience. Like creamed butternut squash, and... is that really a slice of truffle on top of my siu mai? They were fun to try, and delicious in its own way that makes them incomparable to any average restaurant out there--not Chinatown, not Richmond Hill nor Scarborough-land. Definitely in its own league, much like the whole idea of eating here in the first place.
Luckee is a hip and upscale, novel Chinese dining experience more suited for the King Street gwai lo yuppie crowd, where you dip your credit card in soy sauce and see if that ballooning check ever gets Chopped, as you listen to the equally hip servers try to pronounce names like "har gow" with whatever semblance of Cantonese they can muster. Absolutely not a place to take your frugal grandma for her birthday, but maybe a cute hip date. You Luckee bastard.
{TTC: the 504 to Peter Street/Blue Jays Way, or Spadina it to King. Either way, there's still the block walk to the Soho Metropolitan Hotel.}