I don’t know that are produce is that great here in the Greater Toronto Area to be honest. I have had some nice meals north of Toronto, especially a couple Charles organized. I can’t say my own experiences with Cantonese Chinese food in Toronto have been better than my favourite Cantonese meals in NYC, Vancouver or San Francisco. I think California and BC are blessed with better produce than Toronto.
I haven’t been to HK or Singapore yet. My high school friend and her family run several Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurants in HK and Macao. I have always wanted to visit, and I should have done that 20 years ago, when I was travelling more!
I’d not eaten enough Cantonese in NYC to know, but for San Francisco, where I lived and worked from 2006-2011, I must say that the best ones I’d had weren’t really up to standards of Singapore’s best ones.
I go to R&G Lounge a lot, especially for their salt & pepper Dungeness crab. We don’t get Dungeness crab as readily in Singapore, and prices can be stratospheric if we do find them. But the cooking at R&G Lounge won’t make it to the top ten Cantonese places in Singapore. My other go-to places were Great Eastern in SF Chinatown and Peony in Oakland Chinatown, but both would rate as “neighborhood eateries” with very rustic cooking in Singapore or Malaysia.
I’m still hoping to come out to Toronto or Vancouver one of these days.
Salt & pepper is first rate. The off-menu dish that must be ordered and paid for in advance is the deboned whole fried chicken stuffed with sticky rice:
Back in the day, R&G was the next door upscale version of Young’s for lunch plates, with dinner and banquet capabilities that developed well and serve the ownership to this day. It was never in the white tablecloth league as the beloved Harbor Village.
The chicken was given a hot oil “bath” here, i.e. suspended over a large wok filled with bubbling hot oil, which was continuously ladled over the chicken until a crisp, mahogany sheen was achieved.
Grouping Thai with Japanese seems odd to me. The cuisines are vastly different IME. I could see Thai/Lao and really can’t think of a ‘slash’ for Japanese.
Mexican - All of it. From the Pacific coast seafood of Guerrero, to the roasted goat of Monterey, to the moles of Oaxaca and meat dishes of Puebla.
Thai - Isaan
French - mostly the classics, butter-forward sauces
Italian - north and south; Sicily
Indian - I don’t know enough of the various regional cuisines, but north, south and Goan - I eat it all.
Honorable mention: Farm-to-table American - seasonal, ingredient-focused cooking
Something I have not yet tried but am curious about, is Sinaloan sushi. Apparently it’s a thing. Unfortunately, the few restaurants in my area that feature it also have reviews complaining about music at ear-busting volumes, which I can’t stand.
as I said i had trouble narrowing it down to just 5, too.