Canton Gourmet

As it is every January, Snorlax’s birthday came and like the good big brother he is, he arranged for his birthday dinner to be the day after I returned from Montreal instead of while I was there (his birthday is suspiciously close to MLK weekend every year…).  To my surprise and delight – you’ll find out why in a few days – instead of choosing his usual go-to, High Pearl, he chose Canton Gourmet, where I’d been a few times but rarely for dinner.

Per usual when dining at a Cantonese restaurant with my brother, he chose to start with soup. I forget the name of this one (and probably all dishes following), but it was a very clear, slightly ‘sweet’ broth, filled with seafood, a few peas, some button mushrooms, and daikon radish. I enjoyed this light start very much.

SWSNBN wanted squid, so squid sauteed with pickled veggies was ordered. I only tried a few bites of these, concentrating on the dishes I really liked, and found it tasty enough. This isn’t a dish I find myself ordering frequently, though she does enjoy it a lot.

Tofu clay pot – or some name like that, I’m sorry, I am really terrible at dish names! – which contained pieces of fried tofu, fried fish, veggies, all in this really good gravy that is undoubtedly soy sauce, garlic, and corn starch slurry.  What sets this apart, though, is that the tofu and fish still retain a lot of texture on the exterior – not to say that it was still crispy, but there was no mistaking that these items had been fried previously.  To Snorlax’s surprise, as I normally don’t eat tofu, I pigged out on this dish and ate easily half the tofu and half the fish, it was so good!

Oh, and this dish… oh my oh my… I love this dish! Fried rice, yes, but infused, perfumed, just rich with the taste of dried scallops, with sweet bits here and there from the golden raisins.  I don’t know the official name of this dish, but I call it heaven.  Yeah, there’s some shredded carrots and green onions in there too, but really, what makes this dish perfect, is how insanely well the rice is fried – each grain is completely dry and just oozes the essence of those dried scallops (which, if you don’t like the way the ocean tastes, then you might not like these).  This is a huge platter of fried rice for around $11.95 and I ate easily 3 bowls that night, then took the leftovers home.  Yeah, again, Snorlax can be a very good big brother to his baby sis 😉

Garlic fried paper chicken – note the thick layer of thinly sliced, crisply fried garlic pieces on top!  I wasn’t a fan of this – in general, I don’t like paper fried chicken, and I found the pieces I ate to be a bit dry. However, the fried garlic on top was super fragrant and I really enjoyed eating pieces of that with the chicken, yum.

One of my favorite dishes, Chinese style steak! I’m not sure how they make the meat sooo tender – it isn’t quite like steak that I’ve had elsewhere – but it’s coated with a red sauce that tastes suspiciously like kethcup and soy sauce mixed together.  Maybe that doesn’t sound awesome, but it really is (especially when you grew up eating it and you were always super unhealthily underweight so your parents would order anything that you might deign to eat and this was one of those things).  Their version was solid, though I’ve had better, and I happily ate my tomatoes, onions, and saucy steak with my rice.  So good.

Yvo says: Canton Gourmet has never failed to make my tummy happy, and I will continue to go there for yummy Cantonese food for the foreseeable future.  That fried rice dish is out of this world, and I think I may just need to wander by and get just an order of that to go… mmm
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