Comme les Chinois

Disclaimer: I am not vegan, let alone vegetarian. But my friend Kim, who happens to be vegetarian, was in town a few weeks ago. Often I would take the tramway from Central to Causeway Bay, and notice this shiny, flashy new fast-food restaurant along it in Wan Chai on same block as the gas station. The restaurant is called Loving Hut and is in fact a chain originating from Taiwan, but with branches all across the world.

Kim told me that the Chinese-style fake meat she gets in Montreal is often imported from Taiwan. In the Buddhist tradition, followers would have these “vegetarian” days, which I know as “sek zai” (my grand-mother would do these once a week or so, and have tofu-based meals for an entire day).

Just like at a Maxim’s or Cafe de Coral, you must order from a menu next to the cashier. Then, you pick up your receipt and present it to the kitchen counter.

When I went for the first time, I had red rice with mini tofu cubes. Now, I probably ate or saw this dish before in its full-meat version. The vegan version was no less tasty (maybe a bit salty) and I would definitely have it again.

I also had a lemon basil seed (?) drink, which was served warm, and tasted sour with translucent seeds collecting at the bottom of the cup. There were char siu buns too without the char siu.

On a different occasion, now with three other friends, none vegetarians, we tried a larger variety of dishes. One was a classic yu hsiang eggplant, just without the ground pork. And then there was a bunch of noodles and a sweet and sour fried tofu.

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A days after Loving Hut, we went again for vegetarian food, but this time in a real sit-down restaurant. It’s called Gaia Veggie Shop and is situated in Goldmark, right by the south side of the Sogo intersection in Causeway Bay, in the building next to the empty lot (old Mitsukoshi).

My photos are super low-res, so I am not going to post them. It’s good to know that the goal of this restaurant seems to be to fool you as well as possible. I never had fake sushi fish before, but let me tell you that it practically has the same texture, The menu in fact never specifies that such and such meat is “fake”, and dishes are always simply listed with meat names in it (only that you won’t find any meat in the actual order). Thinking about what we ate already makes me hungry… Aside from the sushi, we had a broth served in a coconut, and beef-wrapped enoki mushrooms. There was perhaps a sweet and sour chicken in there as well.

For some reason that evades me, good local Northern Chinese food is a rarity in Hong Kong, where wonton noodles, curried meat soup and Chinese rotisserie dominate the local fast-food landscape. You won’t find roujiamo in a street food stall, while fried tofus, squid, eggplant, or egg tarts, and other pineapple buns are everywhere. (You might also easily find upscale-ish Shanghai or Beijing restaurants in Hong Kong.)

So I made sure that as a must-have meal in Montreal, as I’m spending the Holidays here, among smoked meat and bagels (although no time for poutine), I would eat dumplings, Northern-style. One of Montreal’s prime locations for dumplings is Qing Hua Yuan. They were on St-Marc when they opened last year, but reopened this Fall on Lincoln, close to St-Mathieu in our Chinatown Two, near Concordia University.

The boiled dumplings are nothing special, but now the steamed ones! In contrast to their boiled counterparts, they perfectly conserve their full taste, and if you are a connoisseur of food, you would be careful to pierce your dumpling, savour the broth inside, before engulfing the rest of the jiaozi. The flavours seem to have expanded by a bit (any combo of pork, lamb, chicken, eggs, vegetable, anise, coriander, Chinese cabbage, etc.), on top of the surprising fried dumplings. Extra goodness: the taste of the reed coming from the steamer.

The fried ones (see second picture of this post) are served with a fine film, which I am guessing comes from a dried-up flour mixture, which in itself puts up a nice show.

Unfortunately, they only staffed one person to take care of the whole floor at lunchtime (it was the Holidays though), and cooled-off dumplings and unusually slow service (one hour from sitting to getting meal at lunchtime) were the resulting minus points. On the other hand, they thought of giving shrimp chips as a free-of-charge snack now, like they would give bread in a European restaurant, because steamed dumplings usually take 25 to prepare.

But is not cheap. On my second time there, with my parents at dinnertime, we needed four portions to be full (depending of flavour, steamer/plate is $8-13, + taxes/service). But hey, you’re paying for hand-made top-quality dumplings.

Qing Hua Dumpling, (438) 288-5366, 1676 Ave Lincoln, Montreal, QC H3H