Location:

114 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Cost: $50 for 2

One of our friends has been talking about this place for so long, claiming it to be his favourite chinese restaurant. Ever. And we had tried, on numerous occasions, to eat-in (and even do take-out from) there, with no luck.

So, it became the perfect dinner venue for us on the night we saw WALL-E at the AMC theatre at Yonge and Dundas. There was no question where we really wanted to eat, even after a walk down Elm St. with all the fancier places (like Oro, Thirty-Five, Adega - which I actually DO want to try sometime) toting their Summerlicious menus and vacant patios.

Spadina Garden doesn't have a patio, but I suspect if it did, it would be packed. it does however, have a very nicely decorated interior with very comfortable chairs.



Since we had less than an hour to eat, we looked around at what other people were enjoying and asked our host what he recommended on the menu. His suggestions mirrored our own for the most part, so we went with the dry chilli chicken, the chicken in ginger sauce, a vegetable noodle dish and later decided we also wanted shrimp fried rice instead of plain rice.

We were warned that it would all be too much but we were inclined and happy to finish the rest the next day.

Our vegetable noodles came out in no time. Colourful and crisp.



Then our chicken in ginger sauce arrived....which I thought looked like it may have been the dry chilli chicken.



But then the dry chilli chicken arrived...



The fact that all the dishes reached the table separately bugged us a little bit. I'd have preferred having everything arrive together, at once, so that we wouldn't have been eating noodles first, and then chicken in ginger sauce and then dry chilli chicken.

And how about the shrimp fried rice, you want to know. Well, we had to double check that they'd received our order. They had. And there it was...



With lots of shrimp dispersed within the rice.

But, Foodhogger, how did it all TAAAASTE???

Incredible! Very spicy (we asked for it), fresh and not greasy. It's very good chinese food...maybe a bit haka-ish.

Speaking of spicy, we also requested a SIDE of hot sauce and this is what arrived at our table! None of that Tabasco s***.



You might be interested to know that the left-overs were even BETTER the second (and third - yep, that's right) time around. Highly recommended. Thanks friend.