As soon as I made it through immigration, I headed straight to Crystal Jade La Mian Xiao Long Bao for some xiao long bao. I hadn’t had pork in ages since I’d just been in Malaysia, and I had it on good authority that the Crystal Jade xiao long bao in Hong Kong was better than the ones in Singapore. I was not disappointed.

Second stop was Greenland Taiwanese Cuisine in Wan Chai. Hearty and filling Taiwanese food for very reasonable prices. Set meal for two included seaweed soup, mixed rice, choice of drinks (we chose lychee and bubble tea), and several delicious entrees.

At the last minute, I accepted an invitation for an alumni dinner at Yixin Restaurant, which has been around for quite some time in Hong Kong, its survival no doubt due to its consistently delicious Cantonese fare.

On my last day, I went for xiao long bao one more time, at Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant. We also had some popular Shanghai-region dishes, such as Shanghai fried rice cake and yu xiang qie zi (eggplant with minced pork). The xiao long bao here were the best I’ve had outside of China.

Although the trip was short and sweet, I know I’ll be returning to Hong Kong for more. 香港真是一个美食宝地！

I’m always a fan of crispy noodle bowls just because they’re fun to eat, but the vegetables were good too.

The chicken feet were cooked until they were very tender so it was easy to eat.

I’m still not sure what exactly this was, but it was quite savoury.

Crispy perfection. I didn’t find any meat in this pancake, just some dried shrimp and scallions.

This was the only disappointing dish. They could have picked better cuts of pork. The pork was also not cooked long enough. And there needed to be more black bean sauce.

This is actually a common dish in Singapore, although I’m not sure where it originated. This was a little too chunky and thick.

Har gow, tender and delicate, perfect as always.

The egg custard was good, but I thought the puff pastry could have used a bit more “puff.”

Like last time, most of the items were good, but some were so mediocre you wondered how it could have come from the same kitchen. Still, the good items seem to be consistently good, so if you know what you like, you can come back for the same thing and you won’t be disappointed.

I have been eating all varieties of Asian food, from Indian roti prata to Singaporean laksa to Korean spicy soup to Chinese dim sum. And while I may have died and gone to Asian culinary heaven, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Some of the longest lines were in front of the fish and chips joint, or the McDonalds, or the pasta place that serves only one type of pasta, or, god forbid, the sandwich shop (I mean, really? Sandwiches?). And that’s when I realized: Western food is really popular here. I don’t know if it’s because people actually think fish and chips tastes better than a bowl of curry, or if it’s because of the Asian mentality that “Western is better.” Probably the latter, I can’t imagine a ham sandwich competing with made-to-order roti prata on any scale.

Lunch/dinner at ThaiExpress, a popular chain ‘restaurant’ in Singapore. It can be found in many shopping complexes.

Dinner at Din Tai Fung. Din Tai Fung was my favourite dim sum place in Toronto, so of course I was pleased to learn that it has several locations in Singapore. Unfortunately, there are fewer dim sum items on their menu, because they’re not just a dim sum place over here.

Dinner at a hawker centre. Don’t let appearances fool you, some of Singapore’s best and most authentic dishes can be found at (sometimes only at) hawker centers.

Lunch on Sentosa island, a Japanese restaurant with a beach-side patio.

Dinner at a diner that supposedly has the best laksa in Singapore. I wish I remembered what this was called, but I was following a local. It may have had “katong laksa” in its name, although so did the five other places we passed getting to this place.

Lunch at a tiny but busy Japanese joint near Causeway Bay MTR. They are known for their fatty tuna sashimi.

Lunch at an apartment-turned-restaurant near Sham Shui Po, Western-style cuisine, prix-fixe menu that included appetizer and entree. The dessert (every single dessert on their menu) was compliments of the owner, who seemed to know my friend’s aunt.

Brunch at 霞飛點心拉麵 (Xia Fei Shanghainese Restaurant). Each dim sum item was better than the last!

Brunch at a traditional Cantonese dim sum place, 蓮香樓, Lin Heung Tea House. This was actually the most disappointing meal, I don’t know why this place has such great reviews (is considered the best Guangdong dim sum place in Hong Kong). It was extremely chaotic and dirty, the food was also terrible.

Dinner at a cafe/diner in Lan Kwai Fong. The food was average.

Breakfast at The Brunch Club.

1. Curry fish balls, lobster meatballs, sausages, roasted octupus, and deep-fried calamari. With a side of Hong Kong milk tea.
2. Deep-fried seafood platter, soooo good. Pumpkin risotto was also delicious.
3. I got two pictures from it, but the rest of the meal went unrecorded. I can’t remember what else we ordered, other than xiao long bao and shrimp dumplings, but I know there was an order we added at the end that was delicious.

Let’s walk through a typical day of eating for me in Nanjing.

Breakfast starts at 5am² and is usually at a xiao chi dian which is kind of like a dim sum stand with road-side aluminum furniture. Sketchy? Yes, a little. Delicious? Definitely. Luckily, I’m not someone with a sensitive stomach and I have never gotten sick from eating in China.

In the last four days, I’ve had quite a variety of breakfast items: plain steamed buns (man tou), veggie or pork-filling steamed buns (bao zi), glutinous rice buns (shao mai), fried dough sticks (you tiao), soy milk or tofu soup (dou jiang, dou nao), congee (xi fan).

Some xiao chi items can be repeated for lunch, such as steamed buns. Nanjing has the best xiao long bao in the country, many would argue.

Another Nanjing delicacy is yian shui ya (salted duck). Salted duck in Canada cannot compare, mostly because the duck used in Canada is factory-farmed, whereas the duck here are raised naturally, and therefore contains hardly any fat at all.

Although not a Nanjing specialty, I also got to try pumpkin congee, which tasted truly delicious and is certainly something that could be made in Canada, what with our abundance of pumpkin.

Dinner can range from anything, as far as entrees go. I’ve had clay-roasted free-range³ chicken, sweet and sour fish, five mushroom soup, wintermelon and egg stir-fry, five spices beef, spicy freshwater lobster, and so on. Last night, however, I had hot pot. Hot pot in 37-degree weather? I thought it was a joke, but apparently not.

I was taken to the best lamb hot pot in Nanjing. Lamb hot pot is not a Nanjing specialty, so this was as good as you were going to get in this city. I don’t like lamb and I’m not preferential to hotpot either, but last night’s dinner was damn good. Usually, I refuse to touch lamb unless it’s completely covered in spices, to eat lamb that’s only been boiled in water is unthinkable. But last night’s lamb did not have a gamey smell/taste, and tasted great with some spicy oil and sesame paste.

I am trying a lot of new foods that I used to refuse to eat as a child. Even my uncle commented how I was much better about eating new things; until now, I’ve been rather infamous in my family for my picky eating habits.
Perhaps it’s because our palate changes as we grow. But mostly, I think it’s a psychological change. Whereas I used to feel that I was not missing anything by refusing to eat certain foods, I now feel the exact opposite. It seems such a waste to go to a city and not try the local cuisine. Some things take a little getting used to, but in the end, I believe cultural adaptation is definitely worthwhile!

1. When I say ‘everything’, I’m mostly referring to all Chinese food.
2. Everyone gets up really early here because mid-day and early afternoon is too hot to function, so that’s usually nap-time.
3. Although what poultry isn’t free-range here?

The restaurant is less than five years old, so the interior was still in good shape. However, they had tried to cram so many people inside that all the aisle space was taken up and chairs were back-to-back. I am pretty sure that’s a fire hazard, but nobody seemed to care.

When we were finally seated, we had to share a table with another family, which is never something we really enjoy. The other family was speaking rapid Cantonese extremely loudly non-stop for the entire meal. I think what they said in minute was more than what the three of us said combined for the entire meal.

The food arrived relatively quickly, and in a sensible order much to my surprise, starting with appetizers, then steamed items, and finally dessert.

The Nanjing Salted Duck was very tender and delicious. The Sweet and Sour Pork Ribs were definitely mainland style, although they were under-cooked, and they didn’t use the best cut of pork ribs.

Ji Cai Fish and Egg Drop Soup was thick and fragrant. It was not too salty, and naturally xian without MSG.

The xiao long bao were very savoury, second only to Ding Tai Fung‘s soup-filled dumplings.

I haven’t had sheng jian bao since my summer in Shanghai, but these definitely did not live up to the savoury pan-fried pork buns in my memory. The baos were too big, and the pork filling was not savoury enough.

We don’t usually order fried noodles, but we saw this dish on every table, so we decided to try it. It was very average. It was surprisingly bland, despite the dark colouring.

Green onion pancake was my favourite item, the best I’ve had anywhere in Toronto. It was the perfect thickness, very crispy on the outside, with just enough green onions to savour.

I’ve had these red bean rice cakes before in Ding Tai Fung but these were still warm. They’re supposed to be room-temperature. Because they were hotter than normal, they were extra soft. There was also too much red bean paste inside, and the candy toppings were overpowering.

The food was Shanghai-nese after all, but the clientele certainly wasn’t. We were seated near the door, so throughout our entire meal, there were pushy people waiting right next to us, hovering over our table and practically elbowing us or swinging their purse and smacking us in the head. These people clearly did not know how to keep a respectful distance. One lady sneezed into our food. Another lady kept leaning over our table to get the waiter’s attention. She was there for 10 minutes and the entire time, we weren’t able to eat at all. I was appalled by how pushy they were; they had no sense of propriety despite the angry glares I tried giving them. What was worse, the waiters clearly saw that about 10 people had spilled into the dining area (all crowded around our table, as it happened) and wasn’t asking them to step back and wait in the foyer area. Customer management was non-existent apparently.

So even though we ordered eight dishes, we barely finished and left as quickly as possible. Would you be able to enjoy a meal with five people elbowing you in the head, leaning over your table, and sneezing into your food?

Rating:

Author’s Note: I had to take cameras with my phone, so they came out very low quality. Some photos have been supplemented courtesy of Marz.

Crispy fried noodles with pork, mushrooms, and vegetables. I love the fact that these noodles are not the thin egg noodles that most “crispy fried noodles” in Cantonese restaurant refers to. These were far more aromatic, my mouth is watering just thinking about them. The pork and vegetables (mostly celery strips) were very xian (savoury) but not salty. That is true for most of their dishes, they’re not as salty as the ones you’d find in many Chinese restaurants in North America, true to the Shanghai style.

Beef tenderloin with scallions. The beef was very tender, in an excellent sauce.

Small version of Shanghai Special Hot Pot. Just as good as the big version, except the Lion’s Head meatballs are sometimes over-cooked. The vermicelli tends to be easier to eat in the small version, since the heat is on the big hot pot the whole time that by the time you get to the bottom where the vermicelli are, most of it’s too breakable to scoop up.

These two are from the dim sum menu. On the left is a special kind of guo tie, it’s basically fried rice¹ except it’s fried until it’s crunchy. On the right is a sesame covered pastry ball with a savoury meat filling inside. It is absolutely delicious.

There was also an appetizer, called Shan Xi liang fen, which was a very good cold dish with huge portions (considering it was on the dim sum menu for under $5).

The following is what not to order:

Fried dough with shredded pork filling. On the menu, it just says “pork filling” so we didn’t realize it was going to be shredded cooked pork. This wasn’t very good, the dough could have been sweeter and lighter, the filling just tasted strange.

Xiao long bao. Their xiao long bao filling reminds me of wonton filling, which is just wrong. All wrong. In fact, many of their dim sum items are questionable. I would not order any of the cold dishes from the dim sum menu as those are sitting out buffet-style by the kitchen until they’re consumed, and they don’t look appetizing at all.

1. Think the bottom of a sushi pizza.

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:

1. Ok, very debatable, but humour me.
2. 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.
3. 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.

A group of friends and I joined the frenzy one rainy Sunday noon. Given my preference for northern Chinese food, I hadn’t been to a Cantonese-style dim sum place in a long time. I let my friends do most of the ordering since they had been here before, I just sat back and prepared to eat.

Crispy shrimp cigars were spring rolls shaped like straws, with a single shrimp in each. They were so cute! The spring rolls were crispy and golden. Perfection.

Pan-fried pork and shrimp dumplings were a little burnt, but the wrapper held strong. The filling was average, mostly pork and chives with some little dried shrimps.

Pan-friend bean curd rolls had a vegetarian filling in a bean curd wrapper. The bean curd tasted surprisingly fresh.

Dessert in the form of steamed egg custard rolls arrived too early in the meal, but were light, fluffy, and not too sweet.

Steamed shrimp dumplings in a translucent wrapper sprinkled with roe, stuffed with plump pieces of shrimp. So tender, so delicious.

Steamed shrimp and roe shao mai, in a surprisingly tough egg wrapper. Not as tender as the steamed shrimp dumplings.

Jellyfish and mango salad was cold and refreshing. The biggest surprise? The jellyfish did not taste like canned jellyfish.

Steamed pork rice noodle roll. It was soft and delicious, especially with the light house sauce. If I knew how to make rice noodle rolls, I’d make them every day.

Another dessert that arrived in the middle of the meal, tapioca jelly cups, each with a different ingredient in the centre. One had red bean, one had egg custard (?), and one had a cream-coloured filling that I didn’t get to taste.

Coconut tapioca dessert, with chunks of real coconut, honeydew, canteloupe, and of course, tapioca jelly. Anything with coconut tastes good to me, and honeydew is only my favourite melon, so of course, I loved this.

Another bean curd roll, this time with a savoury ground pork filling that included wood ear (mu er).

This was also a steamed pork dumpling, but the wrapper is made of tapioca as opposed to flour. The filling did not hold together very well though.

The last to come was also the one we were dreading the most: curry octopus. One of my friends had ordered this on a whim/dare. It was a bad decision. The octopus was hard to chew and the curry was more messy than it was flavourful.

Desserts came at the same time as entrees, service was mediocre, but what do you expect from such a large banquet hall? At least the bathrooms were clean. The prices are reasonable, and (I am told) the quality of food is consistent, which is the biggest draw for its loyal customers.

Rating:

We arrived at peak lunch hour and waited about 15 minutes for a table. The place was small and cramped, but service was fairly fast considering they make everything to order. The dim sum was really cheap, and we went a bit nuts – ordered way too much! But that just means leftovers for the next meal.

The green onion pancake came in a dough twist form, which is something I’ve never seen before. It was light and crisp, with very aromatic scallions. The dough was not salty enough, however, and since it was a dough twist instead of a proper pancake, the inner layers were thick and chewy, instead of crispy.

The pork intestines tasted a bit off, as if they’d been sitting out for too long. The spicy marinate was decent though, so I ended up picking out and eating all the shredded vegetables.

I can’t remember the Chinese name for this, but it is a cold dish featuring liang fen, which is mung bean jelly (also known as nokdumuk in Korean). Liang fen doesn’t really taste like anything, which is why it is a great ingredient in cold dishes, because it pretty much goes with everything. This particular platter also consisted of cucumber, carrots, cooked pork strands, mu er, sliced egg wrappers, coriander, and sesame paste. Everything tasted great except, surprisingly, the sesame paste, which bogged everything down instead of making it lighter, the way mung bean jelly cold dishes usually feel.

This vegetarian dish was spectacular. It consisted of eggplants, potatoes, onions, and peppers, and it was so delicious and savoury. The vegetables were baked before they were stir-fried in some sort of gravy. They were gleaming with oil when they came out but that didn’t stop me from devouring half the plate. The potato chunks were like home fries, Chinese-style. I imagine that traditionally, small peppers would be used instead of bell peppers, but then the dish might have been too hot to handle.

The pan-fried pork dumplings were disappointing compared to the other dishes. One dumpling was clearly scorched, but most importantly, the filling was not savoury because a lot of the dumplings had leaked.

Then two large steamers arrived at our table. One was the vegetarian dumplings, stuffed with egg and chive (a combination usually reserved for fried dumplings, not steamed ones), the other were pork dumplings, stuffed with pork and pickled cabbage. Pickled cabbage is a popular ingredient in Northern China, and this restaurant made its own, so this was a real treat.

The egg and chive dumplings were not salty enough – a recurring theme with their dishes, it seemed. The pork and pickled cabbage dumplings were better, although I still appreciated the hand-made dumpling wrappers more than the filling.

We had red bean pancake for dessert (I use the term “dessert” loosely because Chinese meals do not formally distinguish between courses), which were so delicious. The pancake was just crispy enough, and the red bean paste melted against the heat of the dough into a smooth, luscious paste.

Rating:

3636 Steeles Ave., Unit 112-113,
Markham, ON
Tel: 905-947-9880