Golden Court Abalone is a Cantonese restaurant in a plaza of like-minded restaurants in Richmond Hill. I ventured in one day for Cantonese-style dim sum, seeing that it was packed with Cantonese people – they know their food best after all. It’s a large banquet hall, and you order off a menu, very similar to its neighbour, Ambassador Chinese Cuisine, but with a smaller, and as it turned out cheaper, menu. Nonetheless, many items on the menu were ones I’d never seen before, like spicy duck tongue or steamed tofu wrap with pork, mushroom, taro, and duck web. I admit I ordered rather randomly when it came to items I didn’t recognize, but with dim sum, a little adventure never hurt anyone, right?1
The fried items came first, I guess because steamed items take longer. This has always bugged me about eating dim sum, because I like to start my meal with the lighter, steamed dishes first. But in Chinese restaurants, no one really cares about the order of courses. More often than not, dessert is the first thing to arrive because it’s pre-made.
Taro dumplings, or in this case, taro balls, were the first to arrive. When I bit into them, oil from the pork filling oozed out. The outside was not exactly fluffy, but you could definitely taste the taro. However, they were extremely oily, inside and out – if I had known what they were, I probably would not have ordered them.
Shrimp-stuffed eggplant, an item I’ve never seen before, turned out to be a better decision. The seasoning was good, and the shrimp was succulent in the eggplant. However, the eggplant was a little soggy. But then again, eggplant is extremely difficult to do right.
Steamed spare ribs, a staple of Cantonese dim sum, is one of my favourites. Spare ribs in Chinese is pai gu, which is what this site is named after2. These were a little under-cooked – done right, the meat should be hanging off the bones and the cartilage soft. But as always, these steamed spare ribs were savoury and glistening with fat.
Fung zao, or Phoenix talons according to Wikipedia, are marinated chicken feet. They are steamed until they are soft and a blushing red. They are not easy to eat gracefully, but appearances aside, they are kind of delicious – that is if you like chewing on mostly skin, tendons, and cartilage.
Yes, we ordered the “tofu wrapper with pork, mushroom, taro, and duck web.” I had to see what it was! As you can see from the picture, they really need to work on the presentation of this dish, it did not look appetizing at all. And it didn’t taste much better either. I should have known – I mean, honestly, how do you expect someone to eat anything wrapped with duck feet? We ended up having to break the wrapper apart and eat it in pieces. Inside the wrapper, aside from the duck feet, there was a chunk of pork and shrimp, as well as two blocks of taro. It all tasted the same really, except the duck feet, which tasted kind of funny, and not in a good way. This was one of those dishes that sounded, looked, and tasted strange.
As if to save us from the awkwardness of eating something we weren’t sure about from the beginning, this steaming, delicious rice casserole arrived. I love rice casseroles because of the way the rice at the bottom of the casseroles is hard. And with the right casserole dish, the rice is far more aromatic than rice from a rice cooker. This rice casserole was just right.
We saved the dessert for last: egg custard tarts. These were an astounding success, the tarts were fluffy and the egg custard was not too sweet and perfectly gelatinous.
The servers were very attentive as far as dim sum places go, although I couldn’t tell if I should attribute that to their good service or my attentive companion3. The food was average but prices were cheap, and the washrooms were relatively clean. However, with Ambassador Chinese Cuisine in the same plaza, I would rather spend the extra few dollars and go there instead.
Rating: 
- Ok, very debatable, but humour me. [↩]
- Although when I named this site, I was thinking of tang chu pai gu where mean sweet and sour spare ribs, but they are black and not the same as “sweet and sour pork” in American-Chinese cuisine. [↩]
- Servers in these places usually don’t come and refill your water on their own accord, so it may have just been that my companion was very good at beckoning them over. [↩]