![]() (Lunch for two, excluding drinks, tax or tip: $10, dinner: $25.)Ĭhiu Chow cuisine is a distinctive branch of Cantonese. Other Szechuan classics are ma po tofu, deep-fried green beans and one of my favourites, shredded pork in spicy sauce, otherwise known as Yuxiang pork. It costs $12.99 and feeds three to four people. On the menu here, it's called "Home Made Fish," but that's only because no one could translate it. No other restaurant I've ever been to in Toronto serves a whole fish showered in minced bright-red pickled chilies, as is currently all the rage in Los Angeles. But this is the real thing, with obscene amounts of blackened chili peppers. They include such classics as gong bao chicken, the classic diced chicken with peanuts and chili, sometimes rendered as kung pao chicken. Lunch specials range from $4.99 to $5.50. Xu Liang, the 35-year-old chef and owner, graduated from the Sichuan Culinary Institute in Chengdu. This restaurant doesn't even have its actual name on the sign: Ba Shu Ren Jia, which could be translated as "Sichuan Folks." Instead, the red-and-yellow awning fronting Steeles Avenue says, simply, "Sichuan Cuisine." That's a low-key way of announcing one of Toronto's first restaurants serving the authentic fiery cuisine of this landlocked southwestern Chinese province. Bear in mind that owners sell and chefs move on, so don't wait too long to try these. Many are located in malls, so the street address may not even be displayed. Nor does the Yellow Pages list a single Chinese restaurant in its specialty guide. Many Chinese restaurants aren't even listed in the phone book. The staff always spoke English, to varying degrees, and the menus were bilingual, though some translations were imperfect.Ĭlip this list, and keep it in a safe place. ![]() But one humble won ton noodle shop did, as did Toronto's most elegant Chinese restaurant. Not one buffet restaurant made my Top 10 (sorry, Dad). Later, as The Globe and Mail's China correspondent, I consumed yak penis in Gansu and yak burgers in Tibet. I have studied in Taiwan, worked in Hong Kong and lived in mainland China, where I began my culinary adventures by having my own chef during the Cultural Revolution. ![]() My father, Bill Wong, invented the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in the late 1960s. My qualifications include growing up in a restaurant family in Montreal. ![]() But if the restaurant wasn't clean, it didn't make the list. Location, price and decor were secondary. Not every dish had to be perfect, as long as some reached the sublime. Sometimes I went on my own, often several times. Each made suggestions or accompanied me to their favourite spots. To compile a Top 10 list, I turned to a gaggle of gourmands. But with five or six Chinatowns (depending on how you count), I was looking for restaurants worth a special trip. Ting, the World Journal executive, estimates Toronto currently has 800 of them.īut where to eat? I had already dined at Toronto icons such as Lee Garden on Spadina and Pearl Harbourfront on Queen's Quay. But driving around the city, it seems that new restaurants are emerging like, to use a Chinese cliché, bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Even more exciting, it's now possible to sample some of China's other great regional styles: Shanghai, Szechuan, Beijing and Chiu Chow, a distinctive subset of Cantonese. Cantonese restaurants today offer free-range chicken steamed in a lotus leaf and sizzling casseroles of fresh-shucked oysters perfumed with ginger and spring onion. Now, a new influx of immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and especially mainland China has put Toronto at the forefront of a Chinese culinary renaissance. Cantonese chefs tried to meet demand by tossing in spoonfuls of chili sauce. Alas, back then there were hardly any immigrants from Beijing or Sichuan. Then came the 1980s craze for Peking duck and spicy Szechuan food. Among the creations that have endured are a stir-fry of celery, onions and chicken called chop suey sweet-and-sour chicken balls a cabbage-filled knockoff of delicate spring rolls called egg rolls and fortune cookies - which didn't exist in traditional Chinese cuisine. They concocted a distinctive Chinese-Canadian cuisine. ![]()
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