PaiGu

I’ve been eating extremely well in China, which isn’t difficult given that everything¹ here is better than anything I’ve had in Canada times ten.

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.

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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. [↩]

Cinque Terre refers to Cinque Terre National Park, five towns on the west coast of Italy. The towns are connected by hiking trails, and there is nothing better than hiking along the Mediterranean coast for a whole day and then dining at an authentic Italian trattoria for some fresh seafood and home-made pasta.

It was in Manarola that we discovered the best food we would have in all of Italy. We randomly walked into this restaurant for lunch – the restaurant was no different from any of the other dozen restaurants along the street, except that it was quite busy – which is usually a good sign.

Service was quick (by European standards) and friendly, and soon we were served with a large deep-fried seafood platter with calamari, prawns, squid, and anchovies.

The seafood could not have been more fresh, the batter was light and did not soak a lot of oil, and everything was fried to perfection. The squid was unreal.

I had a trofie with sea bass in tomato sauce. The trofie was definitely made in-house, perfectly chewy. The sea bass was tender and delicious, and my only complaint was that there wasn’t more of it. The tomato sauce was somewhat uninspired, but this was honest to goodness Italian home-cooking, straight-forward and uncomplicated. » Read the rest of this entry «

Sen5es Bakery & Restaurant is located on the ground floor of the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto. I’ve only ever read glowing reviews of this fine-dining establishment, so I readily accepted an invitation to go for a Summerlicious dinner this past Friday.

Three and a half hours and $60 later, I walked out with only two good things to say about the place: the servers are courteous and the washrooms are clean.

We had a reservation for 7:00 pm but were cooling our heels in the lobby until 8:00 pm. Unacceptable.

It took another 40 minutes for our first course to come. Granted, we had a party of 12, but we were all ordering off the Summerlicious menu, so they could expect the volume ahead of time (and everyone knows its pre-made anyway), so how long does it take to arrange appetizers on 12 plates?

Grilled romaine lettuce heart tasted exactly like what you would expect romaine lettuce hearts to taste like. The portobello tasted bizarre, and not in a good way.

Gazpacho is a cold Spanish tomato-based vegetable soup. Given that it was a vegetable soup, I wasn’t ready for the chill. It tasted fine, nothing to write home about. The half-cherry tomato came with goat cheese, which was not on the menu. Kind of a big deal, I’m surprised they didn’t put that on there given how they like to put every single ingredient on the menu. Lobster medallions tasted like they’d been frozen and then thawed, but what did I expect? I don’t know, maybe something fresh from such a “fine-dining” establishment. » Read the rest of this entry «