Dragon Meat in Heaven

A hard day’s work had me hankering for the food that has always lifted my spirits, especially when, in our dear culinary gastropolis, every other place seems like an unappetizing tomb. But, even when entrees seem redundant, I’m always enlivened by the comestible stuff that had me serendipitously writing about it in the first place. So, turn away, or cover your eyes, lest you, like me, love absolutely everything there is to love about the food that has me eating first, and talking later, even in the good company of my cibo chum, Joey. That’s right, TAIJI Chinese Restaurant’s food had us eating without a whisper; without the uproarious laughter that always has us celebrating food everywhere. It was a long day, anchored by a meal in a deserted but very much appreciated place.

I went through the list in my mind just to make sure: Mando pop blaring? Check. Plasma television rotating a slideshow of entrees? Check. Portion of the menu in Chinese I couldn’t read but wished I could so I could order the stuff: Check.  Don’t worry, in the humble, warmly coloured space of TAIJI you still have admittance to all your favourites. Chow mein, sweet and sour pork, sesame chicken. And just before you come to a conclusion: stop right there. TAIJI is a civil restaurant. Sure, there are those Chinese Canadian favourites; but there are a lot more of those familiarities from red China, call me a running dog.

Joey couldn’t get his mind off of the curiosity that was egg drop soup, the Italian in him calling out for stracciatella, even if I tried to dismay him. I took the reins after that. There were more interesting things to eat. So I entertained my own guilty pleasures and chose a classic, Cantonese chow mein: a nest of fried wheat noodles topped and softened with a medley of bright vegetables and savoury meats in glistening sauce. If Joey could handle chopsticks as well as me, I reckon he would have beaten me to even more of it.

I’ll be damned if Joey’s stubbornness didn’t pay off, because I was pleasantly surprised by our egg drop soup. Crystalline and viscous, it was a textural pleasure with a clean broth, flavoured with an element of spiciness reminiscent of cumin.

Lastly, and much more to my indulgence, we were graced with fried green beans with minced pork. Traditionally cooked with tough, chewy, and pleasantly bitter long beans, our dish, an homage to the original, was a little more texturally delicate. Supple crumbs of ground pork peppered a plate of soft, tender green beans, juxtaposing the salty, savoury dynamic of the dish with refreshing vegetable balminess. With a little heat, and briny pickled vegetables, our tastebuds were firing synapses like fireworks. If Joey and I were any quieter, you would have heard little pops and bangs, but the happy sounds of our chams and chomps were paradoxically even louder.

Yup, there might be dragon meat in Heaven, but when you’re at TAIJI, who needs it?

Mon, Wed, Thurs: 12pm-9:30pm

Tue: Closed

Fri-Sun: 12pm-10pm

ANY PAYMENT

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The Fallout

Joey and I were looking for something a little novel and dangerous. It had been a while since our last hankering for anything South East Asian, and Mango King’s washed out, faded, regal sign and frosted windows seemed just divey enough to satiate all our unprincipled peptic passions. There we were, imagining our good time: dilapidated tables, peeling paint, stained ceilings, steam rising from the kitchen, clucking voices floating to our ears. Boy were we wrong. An unfortunately clean, conventional dining hall greeted us. Contrived decoration embellished the room with pastoral landscape paintings, sleek tables and chairs, lumbered trims, faux rock splash backs, a bar with an array of alcohol, a chandelier, and clashing multi-coloured buttercup light fixtures. The only danger may have been the commonplace spread that made it so inviting to so many gregarious eaters. Not Joey and I, though. We were looking for lunch on the cheap, and boy did we find it, with lunch specials that were even cheaper. That may be Mango King’s only selling point, because beyond its more than affordable pricings lay a menu burdened with a miscellany of Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese cuisine. There was nothing really spectacular about any of it, except for maybe the crab meat fish maw soup, which is a fancy word for fish lungs (or bladder depending on how you look at it). But I’m saying this all too hermeneutically, with a little too much perspective. I’ll slow down. 

Lunch specials are always a good thing, because you’re usually spoiled with a huge portion and a little something else. Mango King is no exception. Mine was the beef pad thai with tom yum soup and spring roll. Having spent a good deal of my youth working in the Thai restaurant, I’ve come to expect a little sternness with shelling out a decent lunch combination, so I expected some finesse; and while my order was a visually appealing spread of nuclear orange noodles on an enormously satired white plate- perfect for the haute cuisine world, I couldn’t help but be grossly disappointed with my food.

The tom yum, a spiritless bowl of sweet, sour, salty soup any kid could make at home, stocked with four boring button mushrooms, half a cherry tomato and the stalks- not the leaves- of cilantro had me a little heartbroken, but half expecting it.

The spring roll, though nicely coloured with a crispy exterior, was a muck of gluey insides that I thought could have used a little more time in the fryer. And the dipping sauce, a mere syrup with vinegar, could have had a little more punch.

But the pad thai, the star of the dish, was the biggest disappointment. An unappealing glowing orange mound of piled noodles with unhelpful smatterings of peanuts and cilantro leaves contributed to the dish’s very bland flavour. What little taste that did exist slowly disappeared the more I ate, and the incensed aroma that plumed off of it reminded me of the mysterious smoky character we associate with all that Chinese-Canadian food. Still, all it did was turn me off. Any vibrant, bright taste elements I usually associated with Thai Viet cuisine weren’t there. Unfortunately, a place that now defines itself as Thai Viet Chinese cuisine can’t differentiate from the multitude of dishes it offers, which is a shame, because everything seemed to have tasted the same. 

I ordered an appetizer of chicken wings afterwards for the sake of experiment. They were nothing more than another commonplace dish of deep fried chicken wings with an obligatory serving of overly sweet chili sauce. Nothing magical, nothing new, stuff all too familiar. So much for novelty. So much for danger. 

Mango King 
2480 Homer Watson Blvd 
Kitchener, ON 
N2P 2R5 

(519) 896-8188 

MON-THU 11:00am - 10:00pm 
FRI-SAT 11:00am - 11:00pm 
SUN 11:00am - 10:00pm 

ANY PAYMENT 

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Touch the Lion

I’d be remiss if during my days of culinary ethnography I didn’t at least once wax nostalgic about a place so dear to me if only because it was dear, at one point in time, to my dear Old Master. Yes, its eaters made it famous; there was a time when even Bolo Yeung himself would occupy its dining room with none-other than the Iron Fist. And there are still times when my dear brother and I visit, romancing the newspaper clippings proudly mounted on its lobby’s walls, honouring our Old Master, connecting us with him if only in the span of a lunch hour, and lamenting the fact that though we once did thousands of kicks under the moonlight as children, we don’t anymore. Life, huh? But no matter what it’s like, at least there’s food. 

Lai Lai Chinese Restaurant’s reputation obviously precedes it. And beyond its retrofitted, home exterior, beyond the stone lions guarding its doors, there’s good reason. To me, it lives as an extensive historical bricolage of the Chinese food offered in Kitchener-Waterloo for so long. Absorbed in a space of fish tanks, pastel pink walls, hanging dragons, a Buddhist library, and the passionate colours of Red China, there’s a dining room abuzz with familiar customers, some never tiring of typical Chinese Canadian fare, others always happy to have the most estranged eats. 

Lai Lai certainly has one of the most extensive menus I’ve seen too, and though I’m often jawing about how these dynamics can work against a place, Lai Lai’s has refused to pay it any mind for a long, long time. There are lunch specials, dinner menus, options that can take, so I’ve been told, up to half a day to prepare for the customer who so desires. Intense stuff.

To this day, we’re not yet that adventurous, but nothing stops us from a good communal ordering of the most sentimental food. Me, hoarding the most inexpensive bowl of braised beef noodle soup all to myself, and my company waiting on dumplings, fried eggplant in special sauce, and curried beef, ready, despite my own self-indulgence, to share every bit with me.

My soup was a joyful return to the warm spicey aromas I had spent years trying to cook all by my lonesome. Anise suffused in a sweet and savoury broth drowned soft noodles that entangled chewy cubes of stewed beef and crisp bok choy. Our fried eggplant carried the sweet and savoury motif with a little saltiness. Caramelized eggplant gave way in our mouths, crispiness juxtaposing the smooth pulp of the eggplant’s soft flesh. Our curried beef was a simple, familiar flavour of sambar powder stir-fried alongside crisp green bell peppers and onions. Lastly, our boiled dumplings were a chewy treat of roped wonton’s stewed in a savoury broth, exploding with pork and ginger, and accompanied by a vinegared dipping sauce of sesame oil and chili peppers.
But what we were and always are most excited about is Lai Lai’s special gelatin desserts; complimentary thimbles of gelatin flavoured with whatever the house could come up with: coconut, taro, red bean, the list goes on. They were as good as we remembered them, and Lai Lai’s still the paradise it always was in our minds.

Lai Lai's Chinese Restaurant
175 West Avenue
Kitchener, ON
Canada N2G 1R9
Tel:  (519) 579-3031


Monday & Sunday   11:30 am -  9:00 pm
Tuesday -Saturday  11:30 am - 10:00 pm
Holiday                   4:00 pm -  9:00 pm

Any payment

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