First Trip to Chinatown of 2009

Like I said in the previous post, I went to Chinatown two nights ago and stuffed myself silly. We arrived at Spadina Station pretty early and decided to kill some time in Kensington Market. We went to a cute candy store (I forget the name) and a couple of cheese stores. In one particular one, the gentleman behind the counter offered us a sample of a really soft and light cheese that was made in France. The cheese was creamy but light at the same time. The flavour didn't hit you right away. It's a light cheese taste. I don't know how to describe it any other way. It isn't tangy, like cream cheese is or bold in flavour, like old cheddar is. The sad thing is that I brought the wrong cheese home. *tear*

Back to the House of Gourmet of blah, blah, blah. We ordered the same things, the braised beef noodles with wontons, my noodles and the sizzling beef in chef's special sauce. This time, my friends, I took a lot of pictures of the bowl of noodle soup.First came the bowl of braised beef noodles with wontons. I asked our waitress if we could substitute the shrimp wontons for the pork ones, because my friend disliked them, but she told us we weren't allowed. It's funny how we did last time...  

The braised beef melts in your mouth, oozing with the flavour of star anise and other spices. My mom makes a dish that has the beef coming out tasting almost exactly like this. It's with hard boiled eggs and chunks of fatty beef. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Anyway, they gave us a lot more noodles than they did last time so we left some noodles and pieces of lettuce, while devouring everything else. I would like to mention that the huge shrimp wontons that I remembered have changed. These shrimp wontons were the same size as the pork ones. I was kind of sad, but then our sizzling beef tenderloin in the chef's special sauce arrived.

Just like last time, the sauce was already poured onto the cast iron plate. Booo! We noticed, right away, that there wasn't as much sauce as we had last time. They gave us more small slabs of beef this time, as opposed to the larger slabs of beef we were given last time. Despite these changes, the dish was very good.

My noodles came shortly after the sizzling plate. If you look closely at the picture, you can actually see that my noodles were made more smokey. 

Strain your eyes and check out the darker bits on the noodles. 

That's physical evidence that my noodles were made smokier. The disappointing thing is that they didn't give us extra sauce, even when I asked for "more sauce." (I found that when I asked for "extra sauce," the person taking my order would usually mistake it for "XO" sauce. Why? I have no clue. I make sure I enunciate every time I sauce "extra." That's my little story on why I ask for "more sauce" instead of "extra sauce.") Because the noodles itself were smokier, the flavour was stronger than the little sauce we had. That made the plate of noodles crappy. It didn't help that there wasn't a lot of sauce from the sizzling plate, either. Bah! I shouldn't complain. 

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House of Gourmet

484 Dundas St W

Toronto, ON

416-640-0103