Dining

The interior is super cool, with fashionable art deco stylings and an awesome mural running down the whole length of the restaurant. The prices there are absolutely worth noting, with almost all the entrees I saw in the menu ringing in at under $15. The portions were massive too - really, we got two meals in one with the sheer amount of leftovers we took home.

For this review we got spicy fried potato, “ants climbing a tree”, and hand pulled beef noodle soup. The potatoes intrigued me because it isn’t an ingredient you see a lot in Chinese cooking. They weren't crispy, rather tender like a roasted potato, and slathered in a delectable sichuan style chili oil that I just couldn't get enough of. The dish name “ants climbing a tree” (no relation to the classic “ants on a log” snack) comes from the way that the dish's minced pork clings to the vermicelli as you eat it, looking like a parade of ants. The glass-style vermicelli was springy and chewy, so elastic that it whipped me in the wrist when I tried to steal some from my compatriot. The dish had a mild, delicate flavour; sweet and tangy and indulgently garlicky, with the pork adding depth to every bite.

The soup was out of this world. The broth was so intricately flavoured; all of the aromatics danced together in harmony behind the perfect level of spice. The luxurious beef flavour permeated the broth with its richness and savoury notes. The broth was bright, fire-truck red from spice, but not so spicy as to obscure even a modicum of the underlying flavour. The thick chunks of beef were braised until they were melt-in-your-mouth, the simple flavour of the salted meat elevating the complex broth even more. The hand-pulled noodles were chewy and thick, a perfect vessel for the heavenly broth. This is the kind of soup dreams are made of. This is the kind of soup that I have literally dreamt about in the week between writing and editing this review.

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