Enjoying great BBT at Global Bubble Tea

I make this post with tremendously disappointed in myself at having been so behind with my blogging. While I recognize at the beginning of July that I wanted to have 15 posts per month, this did not come into fruition. Needless to say, a combination of being on the wards and having increasing responsibilities caught up to me.

After going to Summer Palace (re: last post) I could not help but stare at the bubble tea shop next door. For those uninitiated, bubble tea is a Taiwanese specialty drink that takes milk tea and pairs with chewy tasty tapioca balls. From there, different flavours of slushies, milk teas and combinations arose and the mayhem spread from across Asia to become an international sensation. Watching a few fellow Chinese brethren make the short trek from Summer Palace after their meal I had no choice but to follow in their footsteps to Global Bubble Tea.

The cavernous and large bubble tea shop is truly one of the nicer and well kept ones I have visited. Brightly lit, "cutely" decorated with lots of booth style and table style seating, the owners were going for the always popular "kawaii" effect for their restaurant. And oh does it work! With lots of fellow customers hanging out and chugging away at their bubble teas.

The menu is akin to most modern bubble tea parlours by adding on top of the classic milk teas with slushes, iced teas and other specialty treats. After picking your favourite type of tea, one must then choose from a bevy of fruit types to add as a flavour base. As if that is not enough, one then finishes it off with either the classic tapioca balls or chewy gelly sticks.

My classic order is always the Lychee Slush with Lychee Jelly and while perhaps not the most traditional, it offers the perfect amount of sweetness to the bubble tea. The version here is excellent with real fruit lychee juice going into the slush. I thoroughly enjoyed the dichotomy of the chewy jelly pieces with the luxuriously smooth slush. Not to mention the healthy portion size to boot too!

Overall Global Bubble Tea should satisfy anybody's hunger and craving for bubble tea. They have to be commended for using real fruit in their concoctions, something that many other bubble tea spots (in Winnipeg) lack. Take the time to drive down because it is worth it.

Summer Palace Chinese - Authentic Chinese

There is nothing that excites me more than a morning off and a new place to try. When that restaurant promises authentic Chinese cuisine, my excitement level takes off over the stratosphere. In reality, despite having an appreciation for global cuisine and all types of food, I will never be able to replace classic Chinese fare and it will remain my go to for any occasion. Thus after a peaceful slumber, I made the long but fruitful trek to Summer Palace Chinese Restaurant.

Summer Palace is located on a nondescript strip mall off of Pembina Highway close to the Bishop Brandin Overpass. The pleasant signage beckons you inside to the spacious and modern dining room. Clearly taking over smaller lots, there are two distinctive dining rooms in Summer Palace, one catering to the Westernized diners wanting the lunch buffets and one catering to those wanting more authentic Chinese fare.

The menu can only be described as sprawling. Over 200 items adorn the pages of the modern menu with the most popular dishes having a pictoral depiction alongside the wording. The fare is classic and authentic Chinese banquet style menu with the bevy of chicken, beef, pork, hot pot and rice dishes. The only thing missing is the presence of live seafood, a small negative for an otherwise impressive menu.

Called Casseroles on the menu, the Eggplant with Seafood (Hot Pot) had a nice amalgamation of Japanese eggplant slivers with a concoction of seafood (scallops, squid and shrimps) all tossed in a delightfully rich and creamy soy based sauce. Slightly overseasoned and heavy handed with the salt, the sauce goes well with a bowl of white rice. Only other qualm is the large pieces of eggplant which, due to its size, did not completely soak up all the sauce during the cooking process.

Crispy Spring Chicken with Green Onion an Spicy Ginger Sauce is another standard dish I use to judge Chinese restaurants. The version here was nicely done with a perfectly fried chicken that preserved the delicate balance of crispy skin and tender meat. The topping of spring onions and spicy ginger sauce was a nice accompaniment and contrast to the tender meat. The addition of soy on top of the already salty sauce made the dish a tad overseasoned again.

Beef Tenderloin, Mixed Mushroom and Green Beans in Summer Palace Special Sauce is a mouthful to order but quick to devour. The incredibly tender tenderloin is carefully fried with baby mushrooms and green beans in a pungently sweet and salty soy based sauce. The delicate flavours all come together to form a taste of umami for the diner. One just has to overlook the smaller portion size.

Overall Summer Palace Chinese Restaurant offers authentic high quality Chinese cuisine. The wealth of menu options will mean that everyone will find something they enjoy. Despite being on the saltier and greasier side, the flavours were well thought out and strong enough to overcome the heavy handed seasoning. Definitely worth a visit.

North Garden - Dim Sum A Cut Above

Despite my travels and adventures into all types of cuisine, there are some days when I simply crave the food I grew up with. And even though my family, being from mainland China, did not have Dim Sum on a routine basis, there are enough flavours and cooking styles here to represent the food I was accustomed to. Thus when a fellow resident on a night of call listed off a dim sum restaurant that I was not aware of, it immediately piqued my interest, rumbled my stomach, and catapulted itself to the top of my restaurant wishlist. And so I was off to North Garden Restaurant the next morning.

Located in Fort Garry, North Garden is a warm and welcoming Chinese restaurant in a small strip mall just off of Pembina Highway on University Crescent. My first marker of the quality of a dim sum restaurant is the clientele ... and so you can imagine the huge smile I had when I heard Mandarin and Cantonese echoing through the walls of the place, excellent! The modern wooden tables and plush decor show a sense of elegance and style that was further exemplified by the eager and attentive waitstaff.

North Garden features two menus on this particular Sunday morning: a dim sum menu offering the classic steamed dumplings, rice rolls, rice and congee dishes; and a lunch menu for larger offerings and family style meals. Being there specifically for dim sum, I focused on that particular menu. North Garden utilizes the paper ordering system as opposed to the traditional method of having push carts hauled around with the various items. I prefer this method as it allows me to get the food as fresh as possible and exactly what I order, rather than having to wait around for the same dishes to roll around on the same carts. Prices seem a bit higher than most, but not extraordinarily so.

The small Pork & Preserved Duck Egg Congee was a healthy bowl of congee filled with pieces of fatty pork and preserved duck egg. The version here was nice with a smooth and silky congee with large bountiful pieces of preserved duck egg. I was less enthused by the dripping pieces of pork fat, seemingly the throwaway portions, that added very little to the dish. Make sure to top off the congee with a dash of Chinese white pepper!

These Steamed Shrimp Dumplings with Bamboo Shoots were a nice offering with plump large pieces of cut up shrimp. The addition of bamboo gave the dish a textural crunch, a nice contrast to the smooth shrimp. The thin dumpling skin was thick enough to hold all the ingredients in without sticking or tearing but thin enough to avoid overpowering the dish. Tasty!

These Shui Mai Dumplings are some of the best I have ever had. North Garden deliberately puts these at the top of their menu and for good reason too, as the four pieces of incredibly juicy dumplings are filled to the brim with pork, Chinese mushroom and topped with fresh shrimp and fish roe. There is an element of sweetness from the tender and plump pork mixture that is unheralded and elevates the entire dish. Texturally you have the crunch of the fish roe contrasting the fatty, juicy and smooth pork.

Pan Fried Radish with Chinese Sausage Cake was unfortunately average. The radish cake was a nice tender softness but underfried such that the exterior only had the slightest of crispiness. Robbed of this textural contrast, the dish tries to do its best to enhance its flavours by adding in Chinese sausage, but overall it cannot recover from its stumble. The accompanied hoison dipping sauce adds sweet and salty flavour to the dish.

Steamed Rice Roll with Chinese Bread Stick is a classic dish that marries crispy fried Chinese dough with the silky texture of the rice roll. I loved the dichotomy of the textures here and found the addition of the dipping sauces, Peanut and Hoison, nice accompanying flavours to the fried dough.

These Steam Beef Balls were only average. Large balls of ground beef are mixed together with cilantro and green onions and steamed to tenderness. While I enjoyed the tenderness of the beef, there were large (and I mean large) globs of pure fat that were simply unpalatable. Furthermore, there was a lack of contrasting texture in the beef ball such that it was simply a monotonous mixture of fat.
 

Finishing off with a bang, the Steam Squids in Curry Sauce were excellent. A personal favourite, North Garden does the dish justice by pairing tender but still chewy squid with a delectable sweet, salty and slight spicy curry sauce. Each bite is a wonderful mixture of the underlying squid with the multitones of the Chinese curry paste and a slight bit of freshness from the green onions. Tasty!

North Garden ranks highly on my list of Winnipeg's dim sum options. Despite the somewhat inconsistent quality, North Garden offers enough dim sum to satisfy even the pickiest of customers. Standouts include the steamed curry squids and the shui mai, some of the best dishes I have ever had anywhere. Definitely a recommendation for anyone looking for dim sum, especially if you are in the south side of the city.

T.H. Dang - Average Vietnamese

After a busy and long week of work, I found myself craving for good homey cuisine, and despite the warming weather, I gravitated back to my soul food of choice, Pho. The combination of warm soup with crisp noodles and a bevy of vegetables and meat is the perfect combination of flavours and textures that serves to re-energize and warm myself before embarking on new adventures. Thus after coming from the hospital, I had to stop at T.H. Dang's Restaurant for some Vietnamese.

T.H. Dang's rests on the busy corner of Pembina Highway and Howard Avenue. The exteriors are average with large signage that should attract attention from passers-by. I appreciated the dedicated parking lot as parking in the periphery can be difficult to find. The interiors are simply average with its combination of drab olden decor with cheap tables and rickety chairs. Finally, the one employee does an admirable job tending the restaurant, but service does suffer a bit with long wait times.

I have to continually laugh at the hybrid Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine restaurants in Winnipeg. As if the owners are not confident enough in creating their own niche, they feel the need to offer dishes from two massively divergent Asian cuisines. As with most other restaurants with this moniker, T.H. Dang's is first and foremost, a Vietnamese restaurant and features the usual pho noodle soups and vermicelli rice bowls. The addition of stir fries and hot pot dishes seem like an afterthought and tacked on to give the illusion of variety. Nevertheless, the menu does have all the usual suspects and should be able to satisfy the wishes of most diners.

I was disappointed by the broth in the Medium Rare Beef & Beef Ball Rice Noodle Soup (Pho). The broth here was devoid of the usual  depth one normally gets in pho broth but rather had an artificial sweetness that overpowered the dish and robbed it of any richness. Granted, the tender thinly sliced beef and large springy beef balls were above average, just shame about the broth.

Dang's Deluxe Vermicelli is a gargantuan boal of grilled meats (Pork, Pork Patties, Pork Hash, Shrimp, Beef) with spring rolls and a bevy of vegetables on a bed of tender rice noodles. Although I appreciated the litany of grilled meats given, each had the same flavour and texture with a hint of lemongrass and a slight bitterness from charred skin. In truth, the best part of the dish were the spring rolls with their crispy skin and moist succulent interior. The addition of the fish sauce dip adds much needed sweetness to the overall dish.

Another marker of a good Vietnamese restaurant is the crispness of their bean sprouts and accompaniments and TH Dang surpasses expectations here with fresh sprouts that added a crisp, slightly sweet crunch to each bite of pho.

Overall I found T.H. Dang's completely average. The disappointing pho broth unfortunately renders any of its noodle soups a monotonous artificial sweet flavour, a shame considering that their beef and beef balls are actually quite good. The vermicelli, while an impressively large portion, was a simple rehash of the same flavours just with different meats. If you are in the area and in need for Vietnamese, then T.H. Dang's should suffice, but there are much better in the city.