Noble Seafood Restaurant

Traditionally, among my friends, dim sum is best enjoyed in the late mornings and early afternoons.  My friends typically see it more as a late breakfast type of meal.  I used to be able to say the same for pancakes, but thanks to places like Fran’s and Golden Griddle, people enjoy pancakes anytime of the day.  I guess both are very subjective.  Speaking of subjectivity, I’m going to be writing this piece from an inexperienced westerner point of view, so if you’re just looking to find out whether this restaurant is worth visiting or not, I suggest you skip down a few paragraphs and ignore all the bits about dim sum itself.

Sara had been having a craving for some dim sum for a while.  I guess I can say the same too since I haven’t really had any since I returned from Hong Kong last summer.  We decided to stray slightly off the beaten path that is the Bright Pearl Restaurant.  So we decided to go check out Noble Seafood Restaurant’s dim sum instead.  Apparently Noble used to be called Rainbow at one point in the time.

According to Valerie Pringle has left the Building, dim sum means “touch the heart”.  Now before you go all “aww.. how cute!”, I’ve been told that the word heart is very literal to your blood pumping heart and not so much the ? type. Now, the differentiation between the literal and the metaphorical heart can be an interesting history lesson along with the real origins of Valentine’s Day… but that’s what Google is for.

As I’ve mentioned above, dim sum is traditionally enjoyed between the hours of 11am to 2pm.  So for most dim sum restaurants around town, if you manage to go earlier or later than the above said times, they usually have a bit of a discount.

Ordering dim sum

So what exactly is dim sum?  I used to think it was a type of soup until I actually went for it the first time a few years back.  Boy, was I wrong.  It’s a collection of different small servings of food you can share.  From vegetables, to meat, to fruits and desserts.  There’s usually two ways to order dim sum depending on the place you go to.  You can either fill out a menu card stating which dish you want and how many or some places have people walk by with carts of food where you can pick what you want from their cart.  Some places have both but most places seem to be moving away from the cart system.  Noble uses the menu card system, which I actually find to be the most efficient because you’re not waiting around for the mango pudding cart to show up.

Now I won’t go into the specific types of food you can get for dim sum but if you want to read about it, you can check them out here.  The usual staples are turnip cakes, dumplings, congee, and fruit pudding options usually including mango pudding.  Some of the dishes we ordered included the above, but we also had Shanghai style soup dumplings, shrimp dumplings with roe, lo mai gai (steamed rice wrapped in a lotus leaf), BBQ pork buns, and chicken with mushrooms on rice.

Shrimp dumplings

I couldn’t get to try the shrimp dumplings due to my allergy but Sara said they were pretty good and bursting with flavor.  You may be thinking when you first hear about the Shanghai style soup dumplings (which do have a specific chinese name that escapes my mind) that they’re dumplings in a soup.  Quite wrong you are.  They are actually dumplings with soup inside.  Yes, inside.  It makes eating them a bit of a trick but I find if you bite the top off and suck the soup out, then eat it, it makes for a nice dumpling.  I had them the first time I was in Hong Kong, then again in Shanghai, but this was the first time I’ve had them back in Toronto and they were almost as good as the ones in Hong Kong.  Almost.

Shanghai style soup dumplings and Mushroom chicken on rice

The mushroom chicken on rice was pretty decent.  I’m not really a fan of mushrooms but they did add a bit of extra flavor to the dish, which would otherwise be boring.  The mango pudding is usually my favorite part of dim sum, and they usually shape it into a small heart.  Noble did not disappoint.  It’s not pudding in the traditional sense when we think of custard type pudding, but more like gelatinous formed Jell-O’esque type pudding.  It’s a mix of puree’d mangos and milk.

Dim sum is a very carb-tastic meal, much like breakfast, so I can see why it’s consumed mostly in the earlier parts of the day.  By the time I got to the lo mai gai, I was pretty stuffed with starch from the buns and dumplings, so I wasn’t too thrilled about eating more starchy rice.  It was still pretty good though, but unraveling the lotus leaf can be a bit tricky the first time you do it.  It kind of absorbs a bit of the flavor of the leaf it was boiled in, which has a slightly plant-like taste to it, but it’s not overpowering and by the time you get to the chicken in the center, you can hardly notice it.

Lo mai gai also known as Gelatinous rice inside of a lotus leaf

Everyone seems to know about the Bright Pearl for dim sum, and it’s ghost stories and haunted past make it an interesting place to talk about, but how does Noble Seafood Restaurant compare?  In terms of food quality, they’re pretty comparable.  So if you don’t really want to endure the weekend crowds at Bright Pearl, especially with Chinese New Years coming up this weekend, I do recommend you give Noble a try.  Gong hai fat choy, lai see sou loi! (Yeah, I do want my lucky red envelope!)