Chic Chinoise
214 King St. W., Toronto. 416-599-8828. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $125.
Eikona Restaurant
364 Broadview Ave. 416-466-7668. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $40.
I am one of those lifelong Sinophiles who is ecstatic at the sumptuousness of Toronto's Lai Wah Heen, but could also, in a pinch, content myself with tai dop voi and egg drop soup at the cheap Chinese restaurants in Nowhereville, North America.
In any small town I don't know, I always, when faced with the choice between a chain sub sandwich, the local greasy spoon and the inevitable down-market Chinese restaurant, choose the latter. Such is my love for Chinese food.
Said love was sorely tested at Chic Chinoise, the glitzy new restaurant on King Street across from Roy Thomson Hall. The theatre-strip restaurant row has never been a hotbed of epicurean thrills, but with this experience matters sink to a new low.
Shredded duck and enoki soup has no taste whatsoever. Assorted seafood and tofu soup has a pleasant but minor flavour. Despite the restaurant's moniker, the menu jumps from Thailand to Japan to Vietnam, with a soupçon of fusion food (cumin on lamb, honey Dijon mustard sauce on lobster). And despite the picture on the menu, they have no lobster the night we're there. No lobster on a Saturday night, when other restaurants by the dozen have it?
We try the fusion shrimps with soya and dill sauce. These are a) overcooked, b) still with their shells on and c) drowning in too-sweet sauce with no sign of dill. The Angus beef with oyster sauce, unlike the usual Chinese approach to beef (bite-size chunks of tender juicy steak), is a thin whole steak with the texture of shoe leather and about as much taste. No knives are available to cut it and when we ask for a knife, they bring us a napkin. One napkin.
Peking duck is a travesty: Not-very-crisp duck skin is served with dried-out pancakes. Its second course is a greasy duck sauté, pathetically under-powered in the flavour department. For $49! Do they think we are bus-tour rubes?
Hot pot chicken has about as much snap, crackle and pop as my morning porridge; large chunks of acrid almost-raw onion fail to help matters. Stir-fried shrimps with creamy egg is just weird: a large helping of scrambled eggs with a few shrimps. Go figure. Snow pea leaves with crab meat owes its principal debt to cornstarch and egg white. Singapore noodles are so dried out one wonders as to their lineage.
For all this delectable bounty, we pay $263.27, including tip, for four people. To put this in perspective, we cruise over to Gerrard and Broadview and order enough food for four people at Eikona Restaurant, including not one but two lobsters. For that dinner, we pay $78.76 including tip. Do the math.
The lobsters at Eikona ($28 for two) are melt-in-the-mouth, fried with ginger and green onion. Hot and sour soup is hot from chili balanced with sour from vinegar. They do soft, ungreasy braised duck with big, meaty black mushrooms and crunchy bok choy in light brown sauce with a hint of Chinese wine. Their spicy Szechuan green beans with minced pork are unfortunately flaccid, but pan-fried Chinese broccoli with ginger is emerald green and crunchy.
Eikona looks like an old-school Chinese dive with the multilayers of plastic tablecloths, and the irony is that it's not a great Chinese restaurant. It's merely pretty good, run-of-the-mill Toronto chinoiserie.
Which goes to show two things: 1) Our standards for Chinese food are pretty high and 2) Chic Chinoise is truly bad. It's upmarket glitz 'n' glamour: crystal chandeliers, a mirrored wall and white pleather banquettes with shiny silver pleather chairs. The glass bar is awash with ever-changing coloured lights. But do you want a light show or good food?