Eating takes me a lot of places. Thrilled to be in a kitchen again, this time as a dish washing golden boy, I did what I always do: ask where people go to eat. What can I say? What better situation to be in than a restaurant to ask about good food? I like to trust the local work, because I assume, as I so often do, that those who place themselves in the world of gastronomica have a strong passion and conviction about what is good and palatable. Alas, sometimes however, palates are accustomed to mediocrity and what may seem good and popular may not necessarily be so.
Told by a young apprentice chef about the best hot and sour soup in town intrigued me. The Chinese soup is definitely well known among the masses, but my experiences with it have been unsettling. I've had it too thick, too flavourless, too lumpy, even with hair petrified in its gelatinous constitution. It wasn't until last year, when I met a dear friend of mine, that I decided to give it another chance. One of my dear comrade's many food vocations was to find the best hot and sour soup in town, and this took us to many places. As is my constitution as a gastroneme, and having overcome my adverse neurosis of the soup, I made tasting the supposedly best hot and sour soup in town my most recent duty. The location was a pleasant surprise as it had been a place that I've always made a personal note of visiting, having been told about it years ago by someone else. And it is when I'm told by multiple mouths about the same obscure place that I get excited.
Kim Seng Seafood Restaurant seats itself ingloriously in the plaza between Westmount and Westwood Drive, Kitchener, its doors devotedly open to the lunch buffet crowd every day, and remaining a ghost town for those brave enough to enter any time after to the lingering family who owns the hideaway and eats together in the late afternoon. Mounted on the place's brick paneled wall is a television showing the ever-present Chinese period drama watched diligently by family, but left alone when the news comes on, later changed by the younger members who come from school in the even later afternoon hungry not for food, but cartoons. Beyond that corner a bar, buffet table and mirror trim surrounding the ceiling as if encouraging whatever diners to police each others’ meals. The floor is red carpet, the chairs black rimmed seats with green ‘pleather’ cushions and pastel print supports, the table cloths nothing more than plastic throwaways readied for mess, and the cutlery a generic white. Beyond the shrines and folk art hung on the walls hangs something I dread: wall menus written in traditional Chinese, unreadable by me and a sure sign of food terrorism, leaving the illiterate Western diner out of potentially better meals from the already extensive 201 item menu. Therefore, let's transition, shall we?
Kim Seng's menu certainly is overwhelming, and exists almost as a catalog of Cantonese and Szechuan cuisine, offering infrequent restaurant fare such as pig's stomach with chili sauce, to more familiar dishes like hot and sour soup. Being the fair diner I am it would have been foolish to avoid ordering what the place's name implies as its specialty (or so my company told me). I mean of course, seafood.
We ordered what we had initially set out to eat- hot and sour soup- warned that the portion of one small is enough for two people eating other choices, so we split it between ourselves. To accompany that we settled for chicken with mustard greens and shrimp with eggplant, a dish on the menu that boasted a hot chilli rating of three and was a seafood dish consisting of something difficult to cook- shrimp. At 5.90, 8.99 and 9.99 respectively we assured ourselves that with some rice (2.00) we'd have a meal that rounded to about 15 dollars per person; and assuming the portion sizes and the dishes we chose, we thought we had made a good choice.
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| Hot and sour soup- y'know? P.s., like my stylistic cropping? |
The soup came first, and man, little homies, it was big. We managed at least three or four small bowls each, which in retrospect we're both grateful for, the soup having salvaged an otherwise poor meal. The soup had good heat and its consistency was charming. It looked thick, but poured fluidly, sans lumps every time we ladled it, filled with a good deal of ingredients- tofu, fungus, pork, bamboo, carrots; the list goes on. I particularly enjoyed its fermented notes. My company thought its sour flavour was too much and resembled the brine used to soak preserves. Maybe I had a hankering for pickles. Regardless, it certainly had flavour, and it lived up to its small reputation. I can't recall a place having better hot and sour soup, but that doesn't mean it isn't out there.
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| I told you. Chicken with mustard.Fr realz. |
Next, and to our confusion, we received a plate of what looked like curried chicken, smelling strangely like the fare served at sporting events: mustard, processed meat and carbohydrates. My dining partner said it was weird; I rebuttled by saying it was infuriating. Our chicken with mustard greens was nothing more than chicken stir-fried with carrots and green peppers in repugnant amounts of honey mustard. There were no mustard greens about the dish and the attempt to call a dish chicken and mustard greens seemed either a jejune mistake in translation and misunderstanding by an immigrant restaurateur (that's had a restaurant in Canada for a long time) or a gross assumption that we as diners wouldn't know the difference between mustard and mustard greens, two relatively different things with similar names. It tasted strange to say the least and was, if anything, an example of how the palates of a nation’s space can change a culture's food (but that’s enough Gramsci). Unless of course, it's something eaten at arms’ length in China that I know nothing about, but it's the first time I've ever had it. We could only wonder what a stir-fry with ketchup, hot dog and bun might taste like, probably good to the eaters that this restaurant assumes set foot through its doors. That was strike one, to carry on the metaphor.
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| I counted five shrimp. |
Next, our shrimp and eggplant dish arrived, a dish also slathered with sauce but this time with chili, garlic and black bean. The coup de grâce, though there was nothing merciful about it, was the five shrimp that came with the dish. Though tender, they left little in terms of balance; it would have been better to name the dish ‘stir-fried eggplant with some shrimp accidentally put in,’ but flashy rhetoric seemed to be the foundation of Kim Seng's menu. Who knew how other dishes were prepared and brought to the table?
It took a good amount of effort to find the deep, sweet fermented black bean flavor that presumably accompanied the dish. It was spicy, but any other taste was lost its starchy sauce, and it took a good number of bites to adjust my palate.
Half way through we came to the realization that we didn't have to finish, and that in a Utopian society where all our basic needs are met, there's no need for bad restaurant food. The dishes were no longer worth the price, and the Chinese family restaurant no longer a quaint place. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to go to China, learn the language, come back and tell them how disappointing their food was. But I'm too damn nice.
And if you don't believe me, then by all means, try it yourself, or better yet, buy me lunch and prove me wrong. Maybe this time, you can police a crisis.
Kim Seng Seafood Restaurant(519) 742-8452
11 Westwood Drive Kitchener,
ON N2M 2K5
Sunday-Monday: 11:30-10:30
Closed Tuesday
Wednesday-Thursday: 11:30-10:30
Fri-Sat:11:30- 11:00
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