Victoria Seafood

Victoria Seafood Restaurant
1086 St. Mary’s Rd
(204) 255-0665 or (204) 255-0669



June, 2011

The newer Chinese restaurants have modern décor with some Asian pictures, and slews of tacky kitsch. Older Chinese restaurants that never bothered to update have dull coloured walls, banquet room chairs and garbage bag plastic spread over the tables. This is the Victoria Seafood Restaurant, although the kitsch starts to spread.

In the past, you couldn’t find much dim sum outside of Chinatown and if you did, it probably came from downtown leftovers—packaged and frozen. The Vic was one of the first restaurants in Winnipeg to offer fresh dim sum outside of Chinatown. Today, among the fields of dim sum restaurants that sprout every week, the Vic stays the same—with the same drab dining room, the same garbage bag table cloths, and the same good dim sum.

Vic’s shrimp dumpling is one of the few disappointments. There’s nothing holding the shrimps together and so the stuffing easily falls apart. The thin dough falls apart equally easily, leaving your plate covered in shrimp tails. I can forgive that, except those tails don’t have much flavour. There’s also virtually no difference between the shrimp dumpling and the deluxe shrimp dumpling, except the deluxe comes with the typical pork dumpling wrapper instead.

By contrast, the pork dumplings come juicy and plump, with nice flavour and not too much MSG. The beef dumplings also have nice flavour; they do not taste too acidic or too doughy, as beef dumplings often can. Beef rice noodles often come swimming in a pool of fat but Vic’s noodles aren’t inundated with oil and they come with a fair amount of meat, although the meat is slightly under-seasoned. Often, dim sum houses offer a sleeping bag-sized noodle wrap with a chopstick-sized meat stuffing. The Chinese are renown for skimping on ingredients (think giant batter coatings with slivers of meat in chicken balls). I don’t mean to offend but being of Chinese decent, I know some of the secrets.

The deep fried spring rolls don’t taste greasy at all, although they’re a little over-fried and dry. Even though the wrapper looks over-fried, the dense stuffing remains moist and flavourful. The pan-fried dumplings also have dense stuffing, but this stuffing is a little too dense. This gyoza-like dumpling should have gyoza-like consistency but instead, its consistency resembles that of a bagel. The flavour is also a little too subdued in these dumplings.

The shark fin dumplings (not made with shark’s fin) features black fungus, which should only act as a subdued flavour enhancer. Unfortunately, Vic uses too much fungus, which dominates the entire dumpling. Westerners generally don’t like the idea of eating black fungus, so you may choose to skip this dim sum selection.

While Vic’s dim sum has some shortcomings, its limitations are quite minor and easily adjusted. Overall, Vic serves good food and good dim sum. Couple the quality of the food with the competent and friendly service (often a rarity in Chinese restaurants) and you have a winning, dining combination. We all know the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I would do some fixing to Victoria Seafood’s décor but the rest just needs a tweak.

***½ /5

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