Great Taste is located in Calgary Chinatown. After a week of meat-centric meals at Banff we had craving for some good Chinese food. Yelp led to back to downtown Calgary. We also had to go through there anyways for the airport back to the USA.
The restaurant is located in Calgary's Chinatown, which is really just a few blocks from downtown. Virtually no street parking, but on weekends lots of nearby pay lots for 3.00 CAD all day flat rate.
Its a pretty large restaurant, but the menu is what's impressive. Its physically large and has a mix of Shanghai-style, Szechuan, and some Canton-style dishes. Limited live oysters, shrimp, and clams too. They include frog too so it must be authentic!
Overall 4 stars. Great Taste tastes great, especially the live shrimp. At 25.00 CAD/lb the boiled shrimp was so smooth, firm, and sweet. All that's needed is some soy vinegar dip. Much cheaper than what we had in Richmond Vancouver, and about the same good quality.
The next best dish turned out to be the simple garlic stir-fried Gai-Lan - crunchy, slightly oily, and so badly needed since we did not eat too many veggies over the past week.
Pork wontons with spicy chili oil were decent - I always like the smooth skin of the wrappers and the kick from the sauce.
The last two dishes were mediocre. Shanghai pan-fried pork dumplings were small and didn't have that oily texture I like. In fact, the wrapper was on the dry side. The 5-spice sliced beef noodle soup had tender and flavorful beef and chewy noodles; however, the soup was on the saltier side.
If we come back to Calgary we will definitely consider coming back to Great Taste.