Sha Lin Noodle House

I remember Sha Lin Noodle house being one of the first restaurants to offer Chinese handmade noodles. Of course, this was quite a few years ago, and since then, there have been numerous handmade noodle joints that have popped up in the city.

The restaurant is located on Broadway, in the block between Cambie and Ash. It's a very unpretentious, utilitarian sort of place. Like a lot of smaller Chinese restaurants, you don't come here for the atmosphere.

Shane ordered Ja Jeun Mein (around $7), a dry noodle dish with a pork sauce and topped with julienned cucumbers. Shane choose the 'pushing noodles'-- you have a choice between 'dragging' (long, thin strands), 'pushing' (slightly thicker and irregular), and 'cutting' (larger noodles, which are sliced off a piece of dough). The noodles were perfect--chewy and with a great texture; the sauce was also really good--the meat was tender and the thick sauce coated each strand of noodle in savoury brown deliciousness, and the cucumbers gave a delightful fresh crunch to the dish. The only thing that is a bit of a flaw was that the sauce was a little too salty. Shane liked this a lot.

I had the chicken soup with dragging noodles. Again, the noodles were wonderful and well-cooked, but what I wasn't expecting was how utterly flavorful the soup was. Most of the time at Chinese restaurants, the stock isn't much of a highlight, but this soup had a clear and delicate chicken flavour. I'm a soup person, and I loved this dish. It is the perfect bowl of noodle soup for me.

We also ordered a side of pork dumplings with chives ($6). Instead of the meat being boiled along with the dough, the pork was actually cooked (stewed?) beforehand, and had the shredded texture of a really good pork bun filling. The chives gave the dumplings a really nice, herb-like, 'green' taste, which was really great.

Our meal at Sha Lin is definitely one of the best meals we've had in a long time. And to top it off, it is incredibly cheap and a great value.

Highly recommended and we'll definitely come back.

New Spring Szechuan Restaurant

A while ago, we were in the Burquitlam area and decided to try a nearby Chinese restaurant that was recommended by our friends Ana and Kay. The restaurant is located on Cottonwood avenue, across the street from the Burquitlam Plaza complex.

We arrived for an early dinner, and when we entered, there was no one to greet us. We just stood there for a few minutes, wondering if we should leave or not, but a few moments later, a friendly woman ran into the restaurant, saying she had just popped out at the nearby convenience store to get lottery tickets.

We were the only people in the restaurant, so had our pick of seats. The interior was plain but clean.

To start, we shared a fried roll ($2.50), which arrived golden brown on the outside and soft and slightly sweet on the inside. As was custom, this was served with a small dish of condensed milk to dip the bread in. This was tasty, and not too oily.

We also shared a small bowl of dumplings in spicy and garlic sauce ($5.95). The pork dumplings (wonton style) were pretty good, though not spectacular. However, what made the dish was the spicy, garlicky, and slightly vinegary sauce that topped the dumplings. This was tangy, pungent, and mouth-wateringly delicious.

We also tried their Hot and Sour Soup ($6.50). For a small size, this was quite substantial. The soup was tasty--with a great level of sour and heat. It's not the best hot and sour soup I've had, but it's quite decent.

We also tried the dry version of their Tam Tam (or Dan Dan) noodles ($5.50). Though the noodles weren't handmade, they were nicely cooked, with a slight chewiness remaining. The sauce was delicious--not too much like peanut butter, which is why sometimes I really don't like this kind of noodle, but this one was great. There was a nice amount of saltiness, and the sauce was lipsmackingly good. I really loved this dish, but Shane was disappointed in the noodles, having had a lot of handmade noodles in the past.

We were really happy with this dining experience. New Spring is a great little neighborhood restaurant: the service is friendly, the prices are very affordable, and the food is tasty.

Lao Shan Dong

Recently, we went out with Ana and Kay again for lunch, and we chose Lao Shan Dong noodle house because neither of them had been there before. Shane and I had eaten here many times because it's usually our pre-movie meal anytime we go to Metrotown to catch a movie. Lots of people have written reviews about this place (as you can see here), but I first learned about it from I'm Only Here for the Food blog.

The restaurant is on the corner of Nelson and Kingsway, right across the street from the Metrotown mall parking lot. There is not much to be said of the ambiance, except to say that the focus is really on the food.

First, we shared the homemade dumplings (15 for $7.95). These arrived steaming hot; the dumplings tasted fresh and the dough was nice and springy. We were given a small dish with a bit of sesame oil, as well as vinegar and soy to make a dipping sauce. We enjoyed this very much.

Kay ordered the dry Beijing style noodles, and he seemed to like this a lot.

The rest of us ordered variations of the noodle soup; both Ana and Shane had the small #1 Beef Brisket noodles ($7.95), and I opted for the pork and beef ball version. You have a choice of spicy or non-spicy. We usually go for the 'spicy', because it's not spicy at all. The soup was delicious, and had a deep, dark brown beefy flavour. There is a slight sweetness to the broth, and the addition of sour pickled mustard gave the soup a necessary tang. The meat was tender and generously portioned; the meat balls also were great, with that slight rubbery texture that I actually love. But the best part was definitely the handmade noodles, which were slightly chewy and which had absorbed the flavour of the soup.

We love coming here. The dishes are consistently good, and we have never left disappointed (or hungry!).

Lu Lu Cafe

If you live in the Lower Mainland, you’ll have noticed that November was a particularly wet month...as in days and days of darkness and rain. So far December has been grand—cold days with a brightness people haven’t experienced in weeks. Saturday was beautiful and sunny. We started off with some yoga at home, and went for a walk along the river, where we glimpsed a blue heron hunching on a branch above the water.

For lunch we opted for one of those places we’ve walked past but never visited, Lu Lu Cafe. It’s on the corner of Lougheed and North road, at a little mini complex that also houses one of our regular eats, Sushi California. I suppose the reason we’d never been to Lu Lu is that everytime we’d walk past there, then walked past Sushi California, we’d always see so many more people at the Japanese place than at Lu Lu’s, and that would tip our feet in the direction of the Sushi place.

We decided to go there that Saturday afternoon, around 4pm. Being quite a weird eating time, the restaurant was entirely empty and we ended up being the only customers at the restaurant. The interior is comfortably basic, with warm pumpkin coloured walls and orange light fixtures. Needless to say, we were served right away.

We weren't particularly hungry, so we opted for a couple of lighter dishes. One was the spicy green bean (around 8 bucks); we'd actually ordered the kind with pork, but the vegetarian one was served to us instead. Despite the wrong order, the beans were tasty, with tiny pieces of garlic coating the bean, which were cooked but still crunchy. It wasn't at all spicy, however.

We also shared the fried rice with diced chicken and salted fish (around 8 bucks), a choice which was inspired by a blog I read, Chowtimes (regular readers of this blog will know what I'm talking about). Shane isn't a big fan of salted fish, but he still found the fried rice to be pretty good. The rice wasn't too greasy, and every grain of rice was nice and distict. There were big pieces of chicken, and tiny bits of salted fish, which I particularly enjoyed. The salted fish reminded me so much of my childhood, because every once in a while my dad would bake one of those things and stink up the whole house! Something that salty is so good with rice.

So that's it, a little nibble of the menu. This was our first time at Lu Lu, but we will surely return. The food is decent, portions generous, and the prices are really good.

Hon's Wun-Ton House - Coquitlam

I always see Hon's as a safe place to go for Chinese food. It's never terrible, but it's not the best Chinese food you can have either. Over the years, I've gone to Hon's numerous times at its various locations. However, it had been a few years since we went to the Coquitlam location, so my mom, Shane and I decided to pay a visit last Friday. It was a horribly rainy day, which made us in the mood for noodles, for some reason.

Like a lot of Hon's locations, the room is nothing to rave over--the seating is basic and cramped, with rows of tables next to each other, and the service is rushed and unattentive.

To celebrate their 37th anniversary, the restaurant had 12 potstickers on for $3.37. It was a good deal. The pan-fried pork dumplings same with a sweet vinegar that I didn't care for, but the dumpling was crisp on the outside and tasty on the inside.

One of my favorite items to eat at a Chinese restaurant is jellyfish ($7.50), even though it really doesn't taste much like anything. It's really about the crunchy, cool texture I guess. Hon's version was nicely flavored with soy sauce and sesame oil, though the sauce was a little salty. Many people don't enjoy this (like Shane), but I liked this.

It was cold and rainy outside, so we shared a BBQ duck wonton noodle soup ($7.25). The noodles were generous, wontons were porky and okay, and the broth wasn't bad. However, we were a little disappointed at the duck pieces we got, which were bony and had very little meat. I did like the way the flavour of the duck seeped into the broth though.

This was the "Szechuan" Style Seafood with Bean Vermicelli ($11.95). The dish came in a big clay pot, and had a good mix of squid, fish, shrimp and tiny scallops. The vermicelli sopped up the sauce really well, but there seemed to be something lacking here--there didn't seem to be enough of flavour and the dish was quite bland.

Our last noodle dish was Beef and Vegetable Fried Rice Noodle ($8.95). We we expecting fried noodles, but instead got steamed noodles topped with cornstarchy gravy. The texture was the same as the previous dish, so eating this got kind of boring. Maybe I just wanted greasy noodles. The sauce itself again lacked a certain flavour, and was again on the bland side.

We probably ordered too many noodle dishes! Having not visited for a few years, Hon's in Coquitlam seems to have changed--the flavours seemed a lot more subdued than I remember. Not sure if I would visit this location again, because other locations seem to be quite a bit better.

Peaceful Restaurant

Last week we headed into Vancouver to see the movie Bright Star, and stopped by for lunch at Peaceful Restaurant, at 532 Broadway. It happens to be along a row of noodle restaurants, including Shao Lin Noodle House.

Like a lot of noodle places, the look of the restaurant is functional. Aside from pink walls, light pink tables, and red lanterns, there wasn't much to the restaurant. The seating was mostly banquette seating along one wall, and in the middle of the restaurant there is a glass partition in which you can watch the noodle chefs at work.

It was a litle difficult deciding what to order, because there were many kinds of noodles, but Shane opted for the Dan Dan Noodles ($6.95). The noodles came really promptly, but we were both confused by this dish because it seemed more soupy than we expected. However, it turned out that Shane didn't stir the dish vigorously enough, because by the end, it was pretty thick and peanut-y. The noodles were excellent, long, with a good chewy bite to it. The flavour was pretty good too, though pretty standard.

I opted for a noodle dish I'd never tried before, the Shan-Xi Tangy Noodles ($6.95). To be honest, when this first arrived on the table, I thought the waitress had made a mistake. It looked like a stew to me. The dish was described as tangy and spicy, so I was expecting something along that vein. The noodles were again, very good, but it just tasted like a cornstarch-based stew, without any spicy or tangy flavors. Plus, it's a small thing, but I didn't like how uniformly the ingredients were cut for some reason. I was disappointed by this dish, because I had an intense craving for something sour and hot at the time. Do you ever had cravings for a particular flavour like that? Nothing else can satiate it.

My last hope were the Szechuan Hot Chili Wonton ($5.95), which I'd had at other restaurants and which usually contain a vinegar component. However, the wontons just appeared to be flavored with chili oil and soy. Again, I was a little disappointed. However, the dish tasted good, though the wontons tasted a little soft.

All in all, I would come back to Peaceful restaurant. The noodles were good, but it seems like I just ordered the wrong things (other dishes on nearby tables looked so much better!). I'd be curious to try their other dishes, for sure. It is definitely good value--good quality and cheap prices!

North Garden

There are about three Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood in the Lougheed area, and surprisingly, all of them have the word "garden" in it (Mui Garden; Yan's Garden; North Garden). Last week we went to one of our regular Chinese spots, North Garden, right on the corner of North Road and Cameron. It's quite a big restaurant, with booths on one side and tables in the rest of the room; at the back there is also an additional room that consists primarily of booths. The decor is minimal, but this place has really tall ceilings which are painted a cobalt blue. The feeling is of strange combination of old-school diner with modern, industrial bits thrown in there.

We've been here many times before, and I must admit that the service has sucked. Being ignored happens on a regular basis, and you're just left alone. To be honest, we've kind of gotten used to this indifference--it gives you a kind of anonymity that can be refreshing. However, much to our surprise, this time around, the service was excellent. Our waitress was nice and not too chatty, and she even asked us how we liked things. Plus, she even asked us if we wanted dessert, and brought our bill promptly! Awesome.

Every time we come here I almost always order the HK style cold milk tea. It's sweet and delicious, and reminds me a little of the 'cha yen' that I used to have in Thailand.

The restaurant has a very large menu, and they have cheap lunch specials. This time around, we opted for the combo dinner, which is 2 dishes with choice of soup, rice, and dessert, all for $26 bucks. This is a great deal, since the soup that comes with it is pretty large.

North Garden has one of my favorite places for hot and sour soup. I love this soup, and I've had mixed experiences with other restaurants. Word of warning though: I like the soup to have strong flavours, and this really fit the bill. It is very sour and quite spicy. Yet delicious! In addition to the usual pork, bamboo, egg, etc., they have really crunchy shrimp in the soup. This is almost up there with the Hot and Sour soup from Bo Kong.

For one of the main dishes, we chose the crispy chicken with soya. This arrived brown and glistening to our table. The chicken was cooked really well: moist, juicy and with really crispy, yummy skin (which was, of course, the best part). The pile of julienned ginger and green onion gave the dish a really nice flavour as well.

The last dish we got was the Szechuan green beans, which is a dish we get pretty often. It doesn't have the special numbing peppercorns, however; this green bean dish has just pork, onion, and bits of pepper. Not spicy at all. However, it tastes pretty good. The beans are crisp (though a little greasy), and the sauce just coats every last bit of bean. Really good with rice.

One of the great things about this place (and Chinese places in general) is the portions. We ate until we were full, but we still had enough leftovers for two more meals.

White Spot - North Road

Probably everyone in BC knows White Spot; it is, as they say, a veritable institution. However, one can’t miss that over the past 10 or so years, the chain has undergone a transformation from a diner/family style joint à la Denny’s to a casual fine-dining aspirant. And I’m sure you’ve all seen the commercials with John Bishop, Rob Feenie and Umberto Menghi, right? It appears they are forever injecting their menu with new international cuisines (like Indian, Italian & Thai). Despite this, I’ve tended to stick with what I feel they do best: burgers, breakfasts and comfort food, because if I wanted to eat a rice bowl or stir fry, I would go to a real Asian restaurant, you know?

On Sunday we went for a walk around our neighbourhood and along the Brunette River, saw blackberries which were starting to wither, and met a few dogs and cyclists along the way. Afterwards, we decided to head out to one of our (formerly) regular breakfast spots, White Spot. A few years ago this location on North Road was renovated to a more upscale décor, with a fireplace, water feature and reupholstered booths. They’ve added cool B&W historical White Spot pictures in the waiting area, and the restaurant walls are decorated with very attractive colour photos of the BC landscape. Of course, there are a number of flat screen TVs as well. I also like this location because it is one of the restaurants that still has Drive-In service with car hops (!).

I have a soft spot for White Spot, even though I prefer other places for breakfasts and casual food. It has such a great history that I really, really want to like it. This particular location is very close to our home, so we’ve been there many times--but most of the experiences have been average at best. Not having grown up with Triple O Sauce (I partially grew up in Thailand and as a kid our family never went out to restaurants), I don’t see the appeal of it; to me the sauce is just some runny mayo that gets all over your hands (I know, I know, blasphemy!).

But on to the breakfast. I had coffee, the first cup of which was surprisingly smooth and without the Starbucks burnt taste that is so ubiquitous these days (the second cup was quite bitter/burnt though). I like how they give you a saucer of creamers in a little dish—it’s a lot more convenient than asking the busy server. Shane ordered Earl Grey tea, which came in a small, white ceramic teapot. One good thing about White Spot is that they serve one of my favourite teas, Mighty Leaf, which is really good loose leaf tea in silk-like biodegradable pouches. The tea bag is large enough so the leaves can properly unfurl and develop flavour. I only order it in restaurants though, because I can’t quite stomach the 15 dollar price tag for a box of it at the store.

I ordered “Nat’s Fabulous French Breakfast” ($9.99), which is 2 eggs, 2 bacon slices, 2 sausages, hash brown, 2 slices of French Toast cut diagonally in half. It arrived on a large white plate. The dish also came with a small vessel of warmed syrup (a nice touch), and the French toast was topped with icing sugar and a generous mound of butter that resembled a tiny scoop of ice cream. For what it’s worth, I did remove the mound of butter right away, before it melted further into the porous fried bread, and do further damage to my arteries. Now let’s examine the components:

· Eggs – they were ordered medium, but they turned out to be quite runny. Generally I like over easy eggs, but I really don’t like egg yolk touching the French toast, which kind of doesn’t make sense because the bread had been already dipped in egg in the first place….

· Bacon – were they there? They were cooked fine, but they were on the thin side, and about 3 inches long.

· Sausage – ok, so this the reason we stopped coming to White Spot for breakfast. White Spot used to have fabulous sausages: thick, flavourful, and quality meat, but a few months ago we were there for breakfast and apparently they changed suppliers and we had a horrible experience of having multiple burnt, undelicious sausages (multiple because we asked for non-burnt sausages and they gave us more black sausages—apparently they didn’t have any that weren’t blackened to a carbon-y crisp because they were still learning how to cook it). Have the sausages improved? Kind of. They weren’t too burnt. They were edible. But they were still dense, hard, dry, and chewy.

· Hash browns – these were actually okay. I don’t love shredded hash browns in general, but these were cooked well, with brown crispy bits and softer bits.

Now on to the best thing White Spot has on its menu, in my opinion: French Toast. The golden brown slices were perfectly cooked and arrived hot on the plate. I don’t know if they just use plain white bread, but it had a great dry-yet-moist texture, and the French Toast has a beautiful eggy, buttery flavour. We make French Toast at home and it doesn’t taste like this, let me tell you.

Shane had their ‘Classic Eggs Benedict’ ($9.49), which is classic indeed: Canadian bacon, poached eggs and hollandaise. Not a fan of the shredded hashbrown, he opted for the fruit salad. The benny was very good; the hollandaise sauce had a good consistency and had a nice balance of richness, lemon, and salt. The only weird thing about the dish was that one egg was poached medium, and one soft (no, the server didn’t ask how Shane wanted the eggs). The fruit salad consisted of pineapple, orange, cantaloupe, honeydew, grapes. It was merely okay.

We enjoyed the breakfast, though it wasn’t too special. Fantastic French Toast aside, there are better and cheaper breakfast places out there. I’m still disappointed about their change in sausage supplier. Sigh.

Lucky Gate

Last weekend after bottling beer with a couple of friends, we stopped by for lunch at Lucky Gate, a Chinese restaurant on Austin Street in Coquitlam (a couple of doors down from Macdonalds).

To be honest, the restaurant blends in with all of the other businesses surrounding it. In fact, I’d grown up in Coquitlam without even knowing that this restaurant ever existed! But I found out about the place through Sherman's review here. After that, my husband and I checked it out for dinner, and it was a pretty good experience.

The restaurant is on the small side, with booths against one wall and tables on the other, and had that typical no-nonsense utilitarian feel. The décor, if there is one, was not memorable. This time we ordered a variety of lunch dishes. First there was the Chinese donut – I’m familiar with these, but seriously, when these long golden twins arrived on the plate, I think these were the biggest Chinese donuts I’ve ever seen. Each one was probably 3 inches in diameter. They were light and airy but oh lord, there was so much grease! Perhaps if these were more properly drained we would’ve felt better eating it. Our friend also ordered soy milk to dip the donuts in, and by all accounts, the soy milk was unsweetened and bland. However, the drops of oil that coated the top of the milk after dipping the donut were a little unappetizing, to say the least.

We also ordered deep fried buns to share. The ten cute little buns arrived glistening with oil and surrounding a shallow dish of condensed milk. We love this—the dough was soft, chewy and slightly sweet, and the deep-friedness of it give it a particularly delicious dimension. Dipping it in condensed milk was also very tasty.

The Xiao Long Bao (8 dumplings in total) came in huge steamer. They were pretty large, and sat on a (much) smaller slice of carrot. Because they were so large, they were a little difficult to maneuver, but they filling had lots of flavor and the soup inside was delicious. It was supposed to have come with vinegar, but this wasn’t brought to our table.

One of the wonderful things about this restaurant is that they make their noodles by hand, and there is a glass partition in the restaurant where you can observe the noodle chef. Most of us ordered a noodle soup dish. I had the pork and preserved vegetable. The noodles were great, toothsome with a really good amount of springiness; however, the broth and the meat were entirely tasteless (kind of a boiled water broth). The preserved vegetable was just salty, without any sourness at all. I had to add quite a bit of soy to make this edible.

Shane ordered the beef stew noodle. It was a big disappointment. Again the noodles themselves were good, but the broth, while quite a dark colour, was terrible. It sort of tasted like Bovril—very artificial tasting and salty. We were very disappointed with the noodle soup dishes. One would think that for a place that has handmade noodles, they could have boiled some bones to make a decent soup.

A word about the service: it was quite bad, even to my lax standards. Our server was this teenage girl who obviously did not want to be working. We had to repeat our order a few times because listening was a problem, and had to wait a long time to get the attention of anyone to request the bill. However, the first time we came here, the service was quite decent.

The place is pretty affordable, except their dishes are on the small side, if you compare portions to other Chinese restaurants. All in all, we would come back here, though I would never get their noodle soups ever again. Lucky Gate strikes me as one of those restaurants in which you need to know what to order. If you order the right things, you’re singing, but if you order the wrong things, it could be a very bad experience indeed.