Following our Northwest Pacific themed, seafood-centric lunch, we settled for a relatively simple Chinese dinner. With a prerequisite criteria that the chosen restaurant must offer one of wife’s favorite dishes - “ Cantonese style steamed LIVE whole fish with julienne scallions, ginger, cilantro in premium top soya sauce and finishing off with sizzling oil “. Our gracious and hospitable hostess, acting once again as our chauffeur, picked this smallish, award winning restaurant as our venue.
Whilst our past Toronto Chinese Restaurant Award winner - the now defunct ‘O’Mei’ was famous for its ‘ Giant Lobster 5 ways ‘, ‘Sanbo’, a Vancouver award recipient is also famous for preparing ‘Alaskan King Crab multiple ways‘. As such, Sanbo kitchen’s forte is their skilled ‘ wok-hay ‘ preparation in all sorts of seafood. However, their rise-to-fame was actually non-seafood related but rather, the result of their amazingly tasty and perfectly executed house specialty - ‘ Rose essence, herb infused premium soya sauce poached free range chicken “! With huge demand for this gem by dine-in and take-out patrons, it was believed that the kitchen needs to prepare over a hundred of this bird every day to satisfy the craving of its fans!
In addition to ordering the above captioned fish and chicken dishes, we augmented them with a simply prepared vegetable dish of ‘Poached pea shoot with fried garlic nuggets in Chicken ‘Shang-Tong‘ broth’.
For our choice of fish, sadly, being a Monday, the priced west coast Grouper was not available. Instead, we opted for a couple of Pacific Soles. Less meaty but with more delicate, velvety and less firm flesh. Perfectly cooked and enjoyable! As for the chicken, it was as good if not better than all the hype bestowed upon it. Flavourful, great texture and yes……extremely yummy!
For dessert, they even offered us a rarely encountered, classic Chinese hot dish…” Baked creamy Tapioca/Sago dessert “.
For our next visit, we have already made it our mission to round up enough people beforehand to try out their Alaskan King Crab, multiple ways! Cannot wait!!
