When we arrived at around 6pm, there were not very many people in the restaurant, but I didn't expect there to be because it was a random Monday night. The lack of customers usually makes me wonder if business is always this dim, but since I've seen the long line ups for dimsum before, it didn't bother me much. I believe many people that visit this restaurant are 'usuals'; waiters greeting them and chatting about random things with them, already knowing what food they want etc.
Tonight our eyes were slightly larger than our stomachs, so we ordered a three dish set meal, despite my aunt telling us that a two dish set meal can feed four people. That's because all set meals come with a 'free' extra dish of either lobster, crab, or chicken. So our three dish meal became a four dish meal.
After ordering, we were served a complimentary soup. All set meals come with soup. I didn't snap a photo of the soup, but it was a lotus root duck broth. It was okay, flavourful without the overuse of MSG. (I'm sure there is some in there....)
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| Lobster in a Butter Cream Sauce |
Since I was craving lobster, my parents allowed me to pick lobster as our 'free' dish. We chose to have it cooked in a butter cream sauce. Usually people will pay a few extra dollars to have noodles added to the base that will soak up all the rich sauce. But since we already ordered more than enough, we skipped doing so. This dish was pretty good; there were enough large chunks of meat to share amongst the three family members that actually eats seafood. The sauce is a bit heavy, but that's expected from cream and butter. The raw shredded lettuce helps balance that. Although the lobster was tasty, my mom says the 'free' chicken probably would've tasted better and been a better value.
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| Fried Halibut with Onions |
For an additional three dollars, we upgraded one of our dishes to the halibut written on a special menu. Unfortunately, those three dollars were a complete waste of money. There were many errors with this dish. Firstly, the onions. Extremely undercooked, still hard and spicy. Not allowing the wonderful potential of onions to be displayed (hinthint, caramelized onions~). Then the fish. More skin and bones than meat to eat and over-fried, resulting in a borderline dry fish. Overcooking such an oily fish is a huge no-no. The Deer Garden in Coquitlam does a phenomenal job with halibut, it's one of our all time favourite dishes. Tung Sing Chin's halibut doesn't come close to Deer Garden's. This dish was a big disappointment.
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| Beef Gai Lan |
For my brother, we ordered a standard Beef Gai Lan. This was the best dish we had all night. The beef was tender and juicy, without tasting like it had too much baking soda rubbed in. The vegetables were young with thin stalks, making it easy to bite into. Nothing worse than gnawing on fibrous vegetable stalks. The overall dish wasn't too salty and it was well seasoned with garlic and ginger. No complaints here.
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| Chicken with Ginger |
Since we didn't choose the chicken option for our 'free' dish, we ordered a chicken dish off the menu. If I were to choose a second best dish, it would probably be this one. The chicken was soft and juicy and the taste was rather 'clear' and light (清), which is good because the lobster was already so heavy. My only criticism is that the sauce is too thick and goopey, a bit too much cornstarch here. I'd give this dish an 'okay lah' rating, hahaha.
To end our meal off, we were served complimentary red bean soup for dessert. I have mixed feelings about the texture of this soup. The good: I could tell the beans were stewed long enough that they burst and naturally thickened the soup making it 'floury' (how do I translate the adjective 粉??) The bad: there were unevenly distributed clumps of cornstarch jelly throughout the soup. Which is used to help the soup thicken if there isn't enough time to let the beans do the job. The weird bits of thickener made eating this unpleasant and I stopped halfway.
The total came to $50 for four people. The price is the same at Deer Garden when my family orders our usual three dish dinner. However the quality at Tung Sing Chin doesn't match up to our standards (which aren't even that high) as half of our dishes were not impressive. We won't be coming back for dinner. The only potential reason I could see us coming back to Tung Sing Chin is to try their dimsum lunch, as many people have said it's very cheap. I would not recommend visiting Tung Sing Chin for dinner, it just didn't cut it for us. Our money would've been better spent at Deer Garden, which is my family's default dinner restaurant.
Love from Coconut Crumpet's Corner ♡
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