Location: 5985 Steeles Ave E, Scarborough (west of Markham Rd)
Website: http://www.chinacottage.ca/
Cuisine: Hakka and Thai
Meal: dinner
My thoughts:
I first noticed their flagship location on Ellesmere years ago when I used to take a class in the area. Why it stuck in my mind I am not sure, but I think it may have had something to do with the name being odd but intriguing. Even still, given the shabby-looking exterior in a rather sketchy strip plaza, I was never compelled enough to try it.
Fast forward a few years later. A friend of mine happened to be telling me about this restaurant and mentioned that he and his family "eat here all the time" and that it's "sooooo good" - that was enough for me to look past its dingy appearance.
So my dad and I had dinner together tonight. Our initial plan was to go for dumplings at Northern Chinese Dumplings, but a sign on the door indicated that they were closed for the rest of the month. I suggested this place as our Plan B. We went to their Steeles location because it was closer to where we were. This location's exterior is a lot nicer than the one on Ellesmere, and I certainly would not have had any reservations coming here.
We arrived around 8:30pm and were shocked to see that even at that hour, over a dozen people were still lined up for a table in the medium-size restaurant. Luckily, the wait for two was only about 5 minutes. Based on what the wait staff here were scuttling to every table of hungry patrons, large (actually, more like humongous) plates of fried noodles or rice were popular items.
We decided on the Golden Fried Shrimp ($10.95). The shrimp was coated with what looked like corn flakes, was very crispy and a good portion size (there were 11 pieces), but it lacked any unique or ethnic/exotic flavour.
We also got the Szechuan Fried ($8.95), which was a very bright orangey-red, which was visually very interesting, but we found it to be try and lacking in ingredients to give it some oomph and differences in texture.
We decided at the last minute to get a small bowl of the Cottage Special Soup ($3.95), which was vaguely reminiscent of hot and sour soup, leaving us not completely sure what made it so unique to this restaurant so as to be named as such.
I forgot to mention that the interior was very modern and had a loungey feel, which was nice. The service was hit or miss (it was really just the host who was unpleasant). Overall, this being my first experience with Hakka cuisine and based on the hustle and bustle of this restaurant and the crowd waiting outside, I was pretty underwhelmed. It seems to have a pretty loyal cult following already, but I won't be back.
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