Golden Terrace

Golden Terrace
245 King Street
(204) 944-9400
http://www.goldenterrace.net/

March, 2009

The former Marigold flagship restaurant, located in the heart of Winnipeg’s Chinatown, long held reign as the favourite place to dine for Winnipeg’s Chinese community. Unfortunately, it also held title as one of the worst restaurants in the city. The food tasted simply awful and if you add the worst server in the world to the mix, you leave expecting an unmitigated disaster every time you walk through the doors. When Marigold closed its doors for good (and none too soon), I had high hopes that its replacement would vastly improve the dining experience for this location. After all, it had no place to go but up.

When you talk about Chinese food, several incarnations come to mind. Many people think of sweet and sour chicken balls, egg rolls and fortune cookies. If that’s your idea of Chinese food, then it really doesn’t matter where you eat because these Americanised/Canadianised dishes will pretty much taste the same from anywhere. I’m willing to bet that you head straight to the buffet table without glancing at the menu. I don’t want to knock it, but it’s not really Chinese food. Other people dream of Sichuan, spicy, Northern Chinese cuisine (think Kung Pao chicken); you don’t find very much of that in Chinatown. Chinese food also evokes thoughts of dim sum, although the Chinese only have dim sum as lunch fare. I know that I review Golden Terrace here, but I have such vivid memories of Marigold’s food that I have to share at least a little with you. When eating dim sum, most people jump into the shrimp dumplings, simply shrimp meat in a rice wrapper that’s steamed. It’s not easy to screw up this dish so diners often judge how good the dish is by how large the portions are (the Chinese are also infamous for being frugal). Marigold found a nice way to screw up the shrimp dumplings; they neglected to devein the shrimps. Every bite you take leaves you with a mouthful of sand (and other goodies found in the digestive tracts of shrimps). Their shrimp dumplings were honestly one of the most awful things I ever ate. Luckily, Golden Terrace doesn’t skip this fundamental step in preparation. The dumplings don’t a lot of flavour but they don’t leave me gagging. In fact, I can pretty much summarise and generalise that the Terrace competently makes dim sum but none of it stands out as memorable. Regardless, today’s review isn’t about dim sum anyway.

A myth exists where Chinese restaurants serve different food to the Chinese than they do to non-Chinese people; this is true but the rules change. As the number of second-generation Canadian-Chinese age, restaurants can no longer anticipate that the customers don’t want General Tso’s chicken just because they appear Chinese. Now the general rule is that if you speak and order in Chinese, you get authentic Chinese instead of Canadianised Chinese. What if you don’t have any Chinese blood in your heritage? If you familiarise yourself with the food and specifically order the food (and it doesn’t appear on the menu even though the menu has 200+ entries), they will serve it to you.

The Terrace’s menu features 187 items and only half of our meal appears on this monstrous menu. We start with the West Lake Soup, which is a ground beef with tofu and egg soup. This simple soup combines an unlikely combination of ingredients but it works well. You taste the potential in the meal but alas, the scarcity of the beef leaves the soup lacking true depth. An abundance of tofu swims in the soup but let’s be honest, tofu sucks flavour out of its surroundings; it has no flavour to impart on its own. More beef and less tofu would give better balance to this soup.

A staple to Chinese cooking is the roasted pork, where the chef takes the entire pork belly and throws it into the oven under high heat. The spiced rub creeps into the underside of the slab and gives great flavour to the meat while the skin on the other side turns into a crispy and crunchy covering. When cooked properly, this divine dish offers great flavours coupled with tantalising texture. The Terrace’s effort leaves fair flavour in the meat but the skin comes underdone and barely crunchy. As well, they cut each piece of pork into monstrous portions leaving the meat not-bite-sized unless you happen to have an unhinging jaw.

Another staple to authentic Chinese cooking is the crispy, deep-fried chicken. When you order this chicken, most Chinese restaurants will present you with a desiccated fowl that screams out foul. Deep fried chicken ends up being sun-dried chicken that falls apart in strips, not like pulled-pork, but like beef jerky—yes, it’s THAT dry. Heed my advice, if you eat in a Chinese restaurant outside of San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any city where the Chinatown has fewer than five beat-up hovels, do not order the deep-fried crispy chicken. How did the Terrace’s crispy chicken make out? Let’s just say that it’s not much better than the normal fried cardboard. The skin is so over-fried that it falls off the meat. The dark meat runs well beyond dry to the point of hardness; the white meat tastes dry as sawdust. Almost every time we order the whole fried chicken, we end up with disaster; I can’t understand why the Chinese (my family included) continue to order it.

I guess it’s almost obligatory to order a sweet and sour dish if you want to experience Chinese. The sweet and sour pork spare ribs come in a nicely blended sauce that balances the contrasting flavours; this is not easy to do. If your sauce has too much sour, your dish tastes tart—and if your sauce has too much sweet, your dish tastes sickly sweet. While the sauce has good taste, I can’t say the same about the ribs. I don’t generally like spare ribs since they have too much bone and not very much meat. What little meat is there is often hard or tough and hard to eat.

The Chinese also consider tofu a staple. When cooked right, tofu can give rich flavours; when cooked poorly, tofu can taste little better than plain gelatine. In its uncooked state, tofu normally comes stored in water. I recommended completely drying out the tofu prior to cooking, which means gently squeezing it until all the water comes out. If you buy the firm tofu, this will be much easier to do. After all the water comes out, the tofu acts as a sponge in soaking up all the flavours around it. When cooking tofu, pan frying on very high heat sears and caramelises the outside. You can also deep-fry it to give it another dimension of flavour. Everything tastes better deep-fried, unless of course you deep-fry the heck out of a chicken until it—you get the idea. High heat frying means that you seal the tofu so it no longer has the ability to soak in the surrounding flavours; thus it is essential that you get it to soak up the flavours before cooking. The Terrace did not do this. The outer shell of the fried tofu tastes fine but the bland insides of the tofu has no means of taking on the nice flavours of the shiitake mushrooms in oyster sauce. If you cut the cubes of tofu in half and immerse them back into the sauce, you’ll get a better idea of what tofu can taste like. The Shanghai bok choy that comes with the dish adds a nice contrast. This item isn’t on the menu; the menu version has no mushrooms or vegetables.

The gai-lan (Chinese broccoli) with shrimps and straw mushrooms in oyster sauce is an absolute gem (not on the menu). The vegetables are cooked to perfection, tasting crunchy and green (overcooked gai lan tastes chewy and stringy). The straw mushrooms add an earthy edge to the sauce. I don’t like eating straw mushrooms because of their texture, which resemble latex gloves but I love the flavour that they give to the dish. The real prize here is the plump and perfectly cooked shrimps. There’s certainly no sandy vein here. My only complaint about this dish is that it’s a little greasy with the glistening layer of fat that most Chinese restaurants cover their food with.

My favourite dish this evening comes in the form of fried sole (also not on the menu). The Terrace lightly batters the fish and fries them perfectly. The soy-based sauce adds the perfect complement to crunchy fish and the slivers of scallions complete the package perfectly. Delicious.

A lot of Chinese restaurants offer crappy beers with even crappier wines. Most have cognac (the Chinese love cognac) and that’s often your best bet. The Terrace has a complete bar and lounge. Their selection of wines and beers isn’t great but at least you have your pick of an array of cocktails.

When I first walked through these doors, memories of Marigold meandered in my mind and I was fully prepared to bash the stuffing out this restaurant. After experiencing their food, I can tell you that there are a lot of restaurants out there that are a lot worse than Golden Terrace. The dishes can be hit-or-miss but if you stay away from the Canadianised selections, you should do all right. Take the leap, toss the menu aside and order blindly—you won’t regret it.

*** /5


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