stepho&crank

25!

For Crank’s birthday this past Saturday we celebrated by visiting Le Quai restaurant, a modern Chinese restaurant with French influence located next to the Worker’s Stadium.

The meal was, for the most part, incredibly delicious (minus one appetizer that brought to mind jello-molds of raw chicken…). We started off drinking some tasty Chilean wine, a Cabernet-Merlot mix that was way better than anything we’ve been finding on the supermarket shelves. After our jello-molded “Sichuan flavor” chicken (which I’d prefer to forget about), the meal started with a delicious battered shrimp, two ways — with a peach-honey glaze and a panko crusted wasabi coating. This was followed by a crispy duck dish infused with black tea (tasty, though not as good as the Peking-style duck the city is famous for). We also had a Beijing-style noodle dish with some meaty-sauce that was definitely on the list of most-tasty-bites of the evening. My favorite dish of the evening was probably the green beans, though, which were served with steamed bread to make tasty little sandwiches and were incredibly flavorful.

The whole evening was great — the food was tasty, the presentation was elegant, and the restaurant itself was incredibly beautiful, with an entrance filled with intricate woodwork and sculptures. The one caveat to the ambiance, which ended up being mostly humourous, was that the soundtrack to our entire evening was a Christmas-hits compilation they decided to loop continuously. Ohh Jingle-Bells. How you remind me of warm, June evenings….

Merry Christmas Craig! (And Happy Birthday, too…)