Still Delicious!

We paid a visit to what used to be Delicious Restaurant on Hwy 7 tonight and was pleasantly surprised to find that after a month of renovations and a total revamp, including a new name, White Orchid is still delicious!  But it really shouldn't come as a surprise as the chef is still the same Patrick Chuang and if anyone can cook, he can cook anything.  In this case, even though the menu has changed, the same expertise and care is applied to the new dishes.  It is a double bonus that the "old" favourites like HaiNan chicken are still there and still the best in town.  So it is now not just a Chinese restaurant, but a Malaysian Singaporean restaurant, making the menu all the more diverse.

We made a point of trying something new on the menu - roti and curry chicken.  The roti are the best ever - I've never tasted them so crisp and light.  The curry chicken is tender and just the right amount of curry flavour.

The Pad Thai, another new dish here, is perfectly al dente and the flavour just right.  I hate the sugary sweet ketchupy red sauce often used by some Asian fusion chains on noodles that are usually too soft. I made a point of using the pad thai dish as the test piece with which to rate an Asian fusion restaurant and very few passed.

And to my utter relief, the Hai Nan chicken is still the best in town.  You wouldn't find a more tender yet firm and tasty white-cut chicken anywhere else in the GTA.   What made this now "Asian fusion" restaurant different from all those other ones out there is that they still serve good old Chinese greens, tossed in ginger and wine.  That little dash of wine made all the difference to the greens. You wouldn't find anything other than "salads" at other Asian fusions.

Dinner finished with a lovely dessert - coconut tapioca with fruit.  The perfect end to a perfect meal.

Chef Patrick Chuang said he is still game to do "private room dinners" for customers.  So this renovation is certainly a bonus.

Squirrel fish?

One of the most important "symbolism" in a Chinese New Year's Eve dinner is the presence of a food with "head and tail" to denote a good beginning and end and also the pun on the sound of the Chinese  word "fish"魚 which also sounds like 餘"leftover".  Half of this character 餘 is made up of the Chinese character 食 (eat), yet another indication of how important food is in Chinese culture.

So for a very good reason, we ordered the traditional "head and tail" dish when we had our Chinese New Year's Eve dinner at Delicious Restaurant last night.  We had all the regular goodies - their famous Hainan chicken and braised pork trotters, both perfectly done.  The grand finale was the very delicious "Squirrel fish", so called because in the traditional dish, the fish would curl up when deep-fried and with the head and tail arranged so that it looks like a squirrel.  I have had this dish at several restaurants in Canada but have only seen one that actually looked like a squirrel when I was in China.  But this one tastes terrific (and looks good) with a sweet and sour sauce and because it was the last dish in the dinner, it's almost like dessert.  The way it was served, with the fish almost standing, was both for looks and for practical reasons - the crispy fish and meat didn't get soaked in the sauce and so stayed crisp. The meat was detached from the bone when it was fried so that even the bones were crispy. The tail and fins were all crunchy, and more importantly for the symbolism, in tact.  Perfect!