Wednesday 5 March 2014

Food Reviews! Dim Sum King, Le Papillon, Arisu and The Shore Club

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd start something new with some food reviews! I'm no food expert but I sure do love my food and eating out! Hopefully, you'll enjoy some of my regular joe(sephina) reviews!

Dim Sum King (Chinese)
Chinatown has some great lunch specials if you happen to live or work around the area. I love to come here for some cheap Chinese brunch on Monday's. It has the best value for average quality food. At around 2 bucks per item you really can't go wrong and can eat to your heart's content. Dim Sum King use to be really good when they first opened maybe a year or two ago but now it's about par on the rest available in the area. I sort of judge by how much they water down the sweet soya sauce for the fresh shrimp rolls and if I get any reheated dim sum dishes. If you want really great dim sum with a higher price tag, Crown Princess on Bay Street is the way to go! It's about $5-6 a dish but well worth it! It's nice to treat yourself for special occasions but definitely not an everyday go to place unless you can afford it. I'll take pictures and post another review later on this place. 

Le Papillon (French)
I've wanted to go here for years and we happen to come across one of those Groupon things to check it out. We did and it was probably one the best group deals for a restaurant we've ever had. Great customer service, great food and we had a blast! I definitely will be coming back here without a voucher. Our meal came with two French Onion soups, one large salad, two glasses of wine, two dinners and two desserts. Above is the photo of the soup, I forgot to take one before I started digging in. I'm not a big fan of this soup but it was so delicious! I loved everything but still couldn't get myself to eat the onions on the bottom. 
We had the duck confit which was really good. I was thinking "oh my, what a small portion" but with the soup and salad I was really starting to feel full. It had an orange grand marnier sauce, which to me what new and I actually really enjoyed it. 

I hate wine period. It's one of those drinks that I have to force myself to drink. It's just way too strong and the flavour just doesn't do anything for me. Until this! This was such an amazing wine! I LOVED it! Unfortunately, I tried looking for this brand at the LCBO and Wine Rack and no luck! How sad :(

We had the apple crumble and the caramel pudding. By far my new favourite dessert of all time is now the caramel pudding. It's not even the kind of pudding you think it is! It's sort of a spongey cake soaked  with hot caramel sauce and ice cream. Absolutely, divine! Even Winton loved it so much! As for the apple crumble, it's apple crumble what more can I say? 

Arisu (Japanese/Korean)
We actually didn't order this so I'm not 100% sure what it is. All I know is that it was noodles in a sort of wonton soup flavour. It was actually super delicious and was great to wet our appetite before our meal. 
I've never had Korean short ribs in a salad before but it's such a great idea to add bits of meat to your salad for protein. I always have chicken or something but beef just kicked it up a notch for me! 

As per typical Korean foods, they always give you an assortment of side dishes to snack on before your food comes. The only thing that I really enjoyed were the candied peanuts, it was a nice change than getting sugary beans all the time. The sweet potato thing was ok and I didn't really like the rest. I like bean sprouts a lot but it just wasn't that great here. 

Winton ordered this sweet fruit chicken dish he usually gets at these restaurants. The portion was really good and the chicken plentiful. I personally usually find this dish too sweet for me, but here it was still sweet but not as bad. There was a decent meat to breading ratio. I hate when chicken pieces are 90% bread and 10% meat!

Here comes my dinner! The presentation was pretty cool! It was on a heavy black stone with a variety of sushi pieces for tasting. It was part of their Winterlicious menu. I can't really say anything spectacular about this as they are your pretty typical sushi pieces. 

The Shore Club (Canadian)

I went here for the second time for Winterlicious with Winton and a friend. I have to say I had really high expectations for this restaurant and with a Winterlicious menu I knew it wouldn't be as good. I usually hate going to Winterlicious now because the value of the food just isn't worth the price anymore. The first time I came here was to have a big dinner with Winton to celebrate my becoming completely debt free. We had such an amazing time with such good food and great service and a hefty price tag of almost $300, including drinks. Here's what I got for Winterlicious... 

To start we order Rock Shrimp for the table to start on top of our Winterlicious appetizer. I choose two ways cod, it came fried and in a sort of pate. It was pretty super delicious! Could of used a couple more crispy toast pieces for my pate though.

I'd have to say this steak is pretty comparable to what they serve at The Keg. There was nothing that special about it and the presentation was pretty plain.  We all knew we were going to share our side dishes and it was nice that they came out separate which made the sharing easier. Broccoli was plain, mash potatoes are how you'd expect but I really enjoyed the spicy mushrooms. 

For dessert, I had order a key lime pie as it was probably the best of the dessert choices. I'm not a huge fan of tart flavour so I don't get this often and this one was pretty sour which was nice but a little too much so for me. On the other hand, Winton had the vanilla pudding and I had a taste of that and still preferred my pie. The vanilla pudding was pretty plain and the sauce pretty average. Overall, I had a good time here thanks to the good company but if you do plan to go here stick with the regular menu. 


Eros and Pookie

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