Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

New Restaurant in Markham: Mong Kok Chinese Restaurant

I tried a new Cantonese restaurant in Markham yesterday called Mong Kok (like the neighborhood in Hong Kong). It’s located in the plaza on the southwest corner of Kennedy & Highway 7 (at 8360 Kennedy Road), and when I went it was only its third day in operation. When I say new, I mean very literally new!

Since it was only a party of 2 at the table, we tried their $24 combo for 2:

• soup (lai tong)
• bbq platter
• 2 main dishes (song)
• dessert

The bbq platter came first, and was barbecue pork (cha siu) and soya chicken. It tasted pretty good, particularly the chicken, but the bbq pork was a little tough. The platter was alright. Unfortunately, the first thing on the table really should have been the soup, which we had to ask two different servers for before it arrived.

The soup was quite tasty, with an obvious pork bone flavor and what might have been fuzzy melon. It’s hard to say, because they served the soup in individual portions (which is different from most other Cantonese restaurants that serve in large communal serving bowl) and had only given us the soup liquid. We wondered whether there was MSG in there, but since my dining partner is usually quite sensitive to it but experienced no issues, the soup is probably MSG free. That speaks well of the restaurant.

The two main dishes we selected were stir fried pork neck/jowl with vegetables and stir fried chicken slices with bitter melon in black bean sauce. They stir-fried well, with obvious wok hei, and decently tasty but they really could have used some more flavor. The meat could have been marinated longer or at least more flavoring added during cooking. The portion sizes were good: we had enough left over to take back home and use for lunch today.

Dessert should have been something like red bean dessert (hong dao sah) but they were out by the time we got there, so we had honeydew melon for dessert.

All in all, the food was decent. The environment is nice, like what a decent, large Cantonese restaurant should be. Service for the most part was good.

I say for the most part because there was one young gentleman who was very rude to his colleagues. Seriously rude and was grating on his colleagues. He never interacted with us – he looked to be a busboy – but since we understood what he was saying to his colleagues and obviously heard the tone, I was left with the impression that he’s a nasty little bugger with a serious attitude problem. The service staff who interacted with us were good with but one exception. We paid by credit card and they brought the wireless card machine to our table to process the payment – but the gentleman never said thank you after we paid he walked away to process the next table’s card payment.

Mong Kok is a decent Cantonese restaurant. There are those that are better, and there are many more that are worse. I wouldn’t specifically recommend this restaurant, but I feel no need to warn anyone away from it, either.