Mixed seafood dumplings in egg-white wrapperTim Fraser for The Globe and Mail
Brilliant Chinese
7220 Kennedy Rd., Markham
905-946-1313
$70 for dinner for two with Chinese beer, tax and tip
It is a law of nature that if you deep-fry a lot of garlic with a lot of chilies, fireworks explode on the tongue. Fun will happen. If you add some tiny little chunks of lobster and ground pork to the garlic and chilies, then you have a really grand flavour event. Which doesn't happen very often. And that's not all. There are a few fermented black beans, and the lobster itself, the main event in the shell, has been dipped in soy before its brief baptism in very hot oil. We're getting close to divinity here; Brilliant Chinese restaurant is indeed behaving brilliantly.
I knew it the minute we walked in. Nary a white face in the crowded room. Always a good sign in a Chinese restaurant. Then they brought the complimentary soup of the day: Chinese yams boiled with pork, which produces a delightful chestnut-flavoured broth.
I had special-ordered a few things. You must ask in advance for their cute purses made of egg whites tied together with a ribbon of blanched leek, filled with diced shrimp, scallops, black mushrooms, and celery for crunch - a great flavour and texture combo. The supernal chicken stuffed with sticky rice studded with Chinese sausage is also advance-order only. As with the egg-white purses, the eye eats first, and very well: The chicken is deboned and stuffed and then put back together, with the wings akimbo, looking much like an intact bird. But look more closely and it's boneless slices of plump juicy meat, the whole thing painstakingly reconstructed and covered in one piece of crisp chicken skin.
We also special ordered baked stuffed scallop. Skip that one. It's scallops in curry cream sauce baked on a scallop shell, as if to ensure their overcooking. Very un-Chinese and un-fun.
A contrast to the Peking duck, of which one never tires. The ineffable combo of crispy grease (the duck skin), sugar (in the hoisin sauce) and sharp (the scallions) does it again, with punch. But this you can get in any joint slinging chinoiserie. The test of Peking duck is invariably its second course, the stir-fry of duck morsels with veg. This rendition is unusually tasty, thanks to a lot of deep flavour in the duck, and textural variety from raw green and slightly cooked white onions, carrot and celery. Add hoisin, wrap in crisp iceberg leaf, and sigh.
Not special order, but very special, is Dungeness crab fried with garlic, served in a bamboo steamer atop rice that has been scented and flavoured during cooking by the crab "drippings." Tofu, so often the blandest of politically correct foods, has no right to taste as meaty or be as delightfully creamy as it is in the rendition with eggplant. There is also surprise in the depth of flavour of e-fu noodles, which are fresh semi-thick noodles whose rough texture is perhaps calculated to catch the flavour of the intense mushroom sauce. Even when they slip and overcook Korean beef ribs, the slightly sweet soy marinade and plethora of crisp-fried garlic chips on top rescue the dish from ignominy.
It makes us feel pampered that they insist on switching old for new plates every couple of courses. But that feeling goes away when they say: "Our machine is broken," when we try to pay the bill with a credit card. Cash only? They should have warned us. I always wonder when I hear the "broken machine" excuse for refusing to take credit cards. Is this a little scam to avoid paying Visa two per cent?
There's only one way to find out. We go back for dim sum the next week. The dim sum, unlike the dinner, is merely competent. They do some interesting things with tofu - like multi-layered bean curd with ultra-thin beef, strong-flavoured and delicate. And they do a very fine silken tofu in delicate yet robust brown sauce. The steamed pork ribs are zinged with hot chilies and fermented black beans. The standards (har gow and siu mai) are unexciting. And I hate it when the wrapper falls off my siu mai because it's not necessarily perfectly fresh. After the magnificent dinner, the dim sum experience is surprisingly ordinary. And disappointment deepens into annoyance when we pull out a credit card to pay. "Cash only," quoth the maitre d'. So maybe the machine wasn't broken last week. Either way, they should have told us up front. All the silken tofu in the world doesn't make up for that.