Today is another food blog. I went to this restaurant with a few friends I haven't seen in a while. This restaurant has the same owner as another more well established restaurant also in Burnaby (老山東 Lao Shan Dong www.laoshandong.com). Just how well established is Lao Shan Dong you asks? Where the restaurant is located (Kingsway and Nelson), Through out the years, I have seen about 4 or 5 restaurants fail because there's no business. Lao Shan Dong has been there for years and years. If you go, I recommend the beef noodles. Anyways, enough about Lao Shan Dong, that's not the restaurant we went to.
The restaurant we actually went to is call "The One" (hence the title). I suppose knowing that it was owned by the same person as Lao Shan Dong, I had higher expectations of its food. Although I suppose even if the owner is the same, the chef is different. I personally love Lao Shan Dong's food, and the prices are very reasonable. On the other hand, the food from The One, was not that great, and IMO a bit over priced for the type of food.
Regardless, I decided to take some pictures and do a blog anyways (just to tell people not to go, haha). The following review is of my own opinion, so please don't come back and tell me the food was good, and I am just a hater. Everyone sees beauty in different ways, and as such thinks different kinds of food is tasty. Although, I must say, I am a born and bred Taiwanese (even though I grew up in Canada), I would think I have more authority in commenting on Taiwanese cuisine. Enough babbling...here goes nothing.
So let's start off with the menu, here's the restaurant's contact information
I normally don't care much for menus, but this one I must say, it is a big giant mess. There's words everywhere, some pages the title of the list is at the bottom of the page while the list it self is in another column on the same page. There's random words of "poetry" every where. I didn't take pictures of the entire menu, but here's a idiotic part of the menu that I found too funny to ignore.
The Chinese actually says something like
"There is a kind of myth that is call a love story; There is a kind of brand that is call the first love."
ok I know that still sounds stupid, but better than "some one kind of..." In any case it sounds stupid in Chinese too. This was the only "poetry" that was translated into English, I mean Chinglish.
Enough about the menu, here's some pictures of food
I ordered a green milk tea, without anything.
It came with a straw (the blue) and (I think) a stir stick (in green). The tea was actually pretty good, not too sweet, but I would prefer more of a tea flavour. I believe the price was $3.75, which is typical for bubble tea in Vancouver, however, knowing it costs 30NT (about a dollar Canadian) in Taiwan I really don't like to pay over $3 for bubble tea.
This is an item I shared with a friend. They called it chicken nuggets. This is probably my favourite street food back in Taiwan. This was one of the better dishes. It was fried pretty perfectly, greasy but not too overwhelming. The chicken was pretty tender, but it could have been bigger. The deep fried basil was a nice touch, I love basil!!
This was one of my friend's meal, 宮保雞丁, basically diced chicken stir fried with chilly, veggies and peanuts. I had a little taste, it was quite salty, probably would have been better with rice. Then again, I am not a big fan of this dish.
Another friend's meal, deep fried chicken on rice. I had a taste of the chicken (everything else is the same as mine). It's basically like a giant piece of the chicken nugget, except it's not a nugget. haha, so this wasn't half bad. The batter had a bit of sweetness to it, which is what I like. If I were to go back to the restaurant I'll probably order this instead. Actually, this WAS my original order, except my friend wanted to taste the pork chop, so I ordered that and shared it with him.
My other friend (the one I shared the pork chop and chicken nuggets with) ordered a lamb hot pot. I also had a taste of this (haha) basically I took a dip in everyone's food. The soup base is not bad, but there's not much of the lamb meat taste to it, I suppose not many people like the smell of lamb, so maybe it's good for others, but I love lamb.
The pot was pretty full of stuff, literally just stuff...there were only a few pieces of lamb meat (those thinly sliced kind). I liked the soup..didn't eat any of the stuff, but my friend said it was only "okay"
look at the pot smoke! The pot came on top of a stove thing. They had a piece of something at the bottom and set it on fire. The one bad thing was that you can't change the heat setting so the hot pot just kept boiling, and the meat gets old if you don't eat fast enough.
Finally my meal came. It's deep fried pork chop with rice, with black pepper and garlic sauce. Another person at the table ordered the same thing with a different sauce. I didn't take a picture of that because he wasn't my friend, he came with another friend of mine. My friend insisted on putting his hands over the pork chop so that there's something to compare it with to see how big it is.
I thought my pooh dressed tigger did a better job as a comparison. Anyways, the idea is "Look how GIANT my pork chop is!"
here's what the thing looks like without things blocking it. It is indeed a giant piece of meat. When I saw it I actually lost my appetite cause it was so huge and greasy looking. It was chopped in to 3, I gave my friend 1/3 of it, and I couldn't finish even 1/3 of it...hahaha it ended up being my dinner for the next night. Ok...so I have quite a lot to say about this dish. The pork chop, yes, it looks giant, but really it's just flattened to make it spread bigger, there was not much actual meat, more batter than anything else. This thing was $11.95 came with some side dishes (up next)...IMO, not worth the money. When I bit into this honk of meat, I tasted grease and crunchy batter, where's the meat?! There's no seasoning to the meat (or I can't taste the seasoning). It wasn't unbearable to eat, but like I said I couldn't even finish 1/3 of it (not because it was so giant).
Here are the side dishes. There's a tomato with egg thing, wayyy too salty, dislike! A deep fried wonton, very crunchy did not have much taste though. The veggie was not salty enough, and was quite bland. The only thing I liked was the pickled radish, very yum, I assume it's because no cooking was required (haha).
This is a side dish a friend of mine ordered, and I took a bite. It's an egg pancake. not that great. The pancake was pretty chewy, but again bland.
Another friend's dish, she arrived late, I did not eat this dish though, I was wayy too full. It's diced pork sauce on rice, looks good enough, but can't be sure.
No, this is not a mountain. It's shaved ice. This is suppose to be the house special. It's got red bean, green bean, peanuts, and taro. The ice was meh (it's ice, whatever) the taro was not cooked enough, it was still hard. The red bean and green bean were not bad, but the peanut was weird. There was no actual peanut, more like blended peanut sauce, very weird.
my other friend saw the shaved ice and wanted one to himself, except he doesn't eat taro or peanuts, so he wanted to replace it with other stuff. The waiter told him he can only replace it with other things that are on the list (ie. red bean and green bean), other things he'll have to pay 50 cents per item. So he replaced the taro and peanuts, with more red bean and green bean (haha)
one thing that impressed me was how clean the washroom was (haha).
The service of this restaurant was ok, depending on which server you get. My friend and I walked in first, stood by the door for about 10 mins, looked around, no one came up to us. There was a guy cleaning something at the counter up front, and a girl was there talking to the guy, turns around, made eye contact with me, then walked away....I was getting annoyed. So finally I walked up to her and said I had made reservations, she didn't say a word turns around, I was about to go RAGE on her, then saw that she was grabbing some menus, and was actually showing us where we are suppose to go (without telling us). There were 2 other servers that serviced us, they were pretty good. In the end when my friend was asking for the bill he put up his hand, and told me the same server (the one that showed us our table) looked at him and turned away AGAIN. So I did not like her, not to mention her shit face ALL the time, would it kill you to crack a smile?
Anyways, all in all, this is definitely not "The One," and yes pun intended. Not something I would recommend. The ambiance is great and all, maybe for drinking tea and chatting, but I would not go there for meals.
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