Grand Neptune Seafood Restaurant 龍廷海鮮酒家 — Restaurant in Burnaby

Grand Exit?

First time trying out this place, the new addition to the one of Neptune groups that took over the previous restaurant, Grand Dynasty. I believe the local medias kind of make a big deal about it being “grand” etc…, during its “grand opening” and its AYCE crab and lobster special plastered everywhere by the so call foodies (just FYI, it’s not a good deal when the price of live crabs are so cheap nowadays, do the math, unless you are one of those people who’s incompetent in cooking an egg then nvm).

This place is located beside the Grand Villa casino in Burnaby. There are plentiful of parking available everywhere.

Upon entering the restaurant, there wasn’t anything grand with a quick glance of my eyes (maybe compared to a hot dog stand it’s grand, seems like another hype by the so called foodies, disappointing). The hostess/manager greeted us and led us to our table, right to the back corner beside the back exit door, lovely! Quick grand exit after done eating came to my mind (eat and dash). There were plenty of empty tables available so why?? I mean I do dress quite presentable and quite an appealing human being? (Facepalm)

Anyways, here were the food I ordered for dim sum for 2;

Steamed tomato and egg dumplings. I honestly don’t know what I was supposed to taste? All the ingredients seem to masked each other out! But they look nice though. Deep fried eggplant with shrimp paste. Pretty generic dim sum dish. Steamed chicken feet in black bean sauce. Another generic dish with no special touch to it but this is one must have dim sum for me in any restaurant. Steamed rice rolls with dry shrimps and green onions. A sub par dish, the rice rolls missing that silky smooth texture. Steamed spicy beef tripes. Very mild spicy flavour and the tripes could’ve been cut in thinner pieces. Assorted shrimp dumplings in soup. The broth was actually quite tasty with a generous portion of shrimp dumplings. Hello kitty steamed salty egg lava buns. The bun texture was a bit too stretchy but the salty egg cream was decently good. (Hello Kitty is Japanese? Why on the buns their eyes slant downward?) Lychee and mango rabbit dessert. Very cute and actually quite refreshing. Diced beef tenderloin with cucumber. A little bit too salty and overcooked on the beef a bit. Country style fried vermicelli. One of my favourite wok fried vermicelli dish if done proper with a good amount of “wok hay”. This dish was okay, missing some wok hay.

Overall, the place and service were okay, nothing spectacular or grand in my honest opinion. The dim sum food was pretty basic and mostly generic but with a high mid level price tag. However to be fair, their dessert dim sum were quite cute and tasty, this they deserved a little credit. In conclusion, I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon. For a similar price tag, I would prefer places like Seaport restaurant more; better food and service, and the atmosphere is more grand. A grand exit for me on this one.

P.S. they have a special promo till end of January, 2024; purchase $100 gift card you’ll get extra $10 plus free tea and extra 10% off bill. In addition, you can use it to pay your...

Newish addition to the Neptune restaurant group and located in the former Grand Dynasty location at Grand Villa.

Our first visit was for dim sum. Most items were top notch as can be expected from Neptune and included a light passion fruit mousse which was not too sweetor too tart. The deep fried taro dumplings with pork and fried shrimp had the prefect creamy consistency. Steamed bean curd wraps had big shrimp filling inside. Also enjoyed the chiu chow dumplings and the baked bbq pork buns with cookie top. Rounded out our meal with the lychee and mango rabbit and the Chinese donut rice roll (liked the green onions but the Chinese donut wasn't crisp enough).

Update: Feb 26, 2024 Back in late February, Grand Neptune was heavily promoting a special AYCE king crab at $200/person. We obviously couldn't eat that much king crab to make it worthwhile so we went with their ala carte pricing of $26.99/lb. That pricing is the best I've seen in years and was only available for a week.

This was one of the better king crab meals that I've had for a long time. We opted to have it prepared steamed with garlic for the legs, spicy fried knuckles, and with baked Portuguese rice in the shell. Each dish was great but we were really impressed with the rice... creamy and full of shrimp, scallop, and king crab meat. We added a dish of stir fried pea tips in garlic sauce and they were nicely prepared and crisp to the bite.

The king crab was 6.75lbs which worked out to $182.18 + $25.88 for preparing it and and extra $38.80 for the Portuguese fried rice (well worth the price).

Update: Mar 10, 2024 Another visit for dim sum... Chiu chow dumplings $9.80 had large filling contained in the thin wrapper. Mango pudding was sweet and refreshing $8.35. Deep fried pork dumplings (aka footballs) had a nice crisp which contained the mochi-like texture surrounding the pork filling $9.8. The bean curd wrap dumplings $10.80 had big filling a well and turned out perfectly.

Pan fried shrimp and chive dumplings $10.80 were good but I actually liked it better when I mixed it with the ginger and green onion sauce that came with the crab. Oh, did I mention they did a good job of convincing us to get their crab special?

I mean, $20 for a ginger and green onion crab is a pretty good deal. Even though the crab wasn't huge, it was well prepared.

We also wound up ordering the strawberry coconut bunny $7.95 as they had a guy carrying these around to the tables. It was cute and jiggled to the touch. Not much strawberry flavour tho.

Update September 2024: Ordered the steamed spicy beef tripe which was both tender and spicy. Eggplant with shrimp paste was good too. Chiu chow dumplings, pan fried turnip cakes and mango gelatin rounded...

Great marketing, terrible experience.

Best believe in this day and age, not everything on social media is as good as it seems. We came here for the all you can eat king crab experience that we saw plastered all over Instagram. The deal included $198 per person for all you can eat king crab where you get to choose from a variety of ways to have king crab served for a minimum of 4 people. We sat down with a table of 5, and for $1000 per table, you would expect to leave the restaurant full, or at least satisfied. That was not the case. Each dish that came out was finished in 5 minutes, and the next 20 minutes were spent waiting on the next dish to arrive. We already had a feeling we would not be full by the time the third dish came (an hour into our meal). We told the manager the food needed to come out quicker as we had 5 people sharing each plate that arrived, but we were told the kitchen was backed up. We ended up having to overlap our orders to get dishes sooner. In the end, we ordered 4 crabs, but only 3 arrived. We waited about 45 minutes before asking the restaurant staff for an update on out last crab just to find out the kitchen staff had all left (at 920 pm...restaurant closes at 10pm) without any notice on last call. We expressed our frustration with the entire situation, and we offered solutions to the restaurant: 1. Charge us for the 3 crabs instead of $200 per head or 2. Take one person off the bill. Neither was possible according to the manager. He then offered us 1 free crab at our next visit. Reluctantly, we agreed, knowing 2 of us do not live in the city and therefore would not be able to enjoy the compensation. The manager left and went to talk to his manager just to come back and rescind the offer and said there is nothing they can do to rectify the situation. He had said we sat for longer than the alloted time of 1.5 hours. We had told them to check cameras as the food took 20 minutes to arrive and another 25 minutes between each dish. The manager said that was not his problem. We went back and forth for 5 minutes just to end up in a stalemate. We ended up paying the bill (there's a 2% surcharge if you pay credit card, btw). All in all, this was a terrible mismarketed experience. The "all you can eat" is a scam. The food comes at such a slow cadence that it is more worthwhile to order the king crab individually without a seating time limit. We left the restaurant dissatisfied and still hungry. In the future, take any social media marketed experience with a very light...