Tenon Vegetarian Cuisine — Restaurant in Markham

This happend years ago. Possibly even 7 years ago, but I will never forget what happend. It was the worst racism I ever experienced in my entire life and I’ve had people swear at me for my race. I came here to eat with my mom and we are Chinese. The waitress was also Chinese and gave us normal seats and had this whatever attitude with us. I’m used to this with many Chinese servers so I didn’t think much of it. Until later 2 groups of people came. A black and white family came and she treated them like royalty. She used a high pitch voice and was super nice with them. It’s like she was putting on a show for them. She gave them the nice seats in the middle while my mom and I were shoved to the corner. By the way, only us 3 groups were in the restaurant. She was super friendly to them and when I needed her, she came and her whole demeaner changed and she was like what? It was really awful to be treated like that throughout the meal and made the whole experience bad. I actually loved the food and thought it was incredible, but I never went and never will go back because of that waitress. We even tipped her as usual and didn’t say anything at the time. We should have complained about her. She basically thought that because we are Chinese, she doesn’t have to put effort into us because we won’t tip her. But then she thinks because the other groups weren’t Chinese, they would give her bigger tips. None of the groups were dressed fancy, we were all wearing normal clothes and just looked like your average people. She just stereotyped us based on race. Well I was born and raised here and my mother at that point has been here for over 40 years. We have it ingrained in us about the etiquette on tipping and it’s obvious that the way we look, we have assimilated into Canadian culture. But to her, just because we are Chinese, no matter how good our English is, we are bad tippers because we are Chinese. Probably one of the worst service I ever had. I hope she’s not still there, but if she happens to read this, just know that you are an internalized racist and lost customers for...

This place has been here for over 20 years so I figured it's gotta be good to be able to survive for so long.

NOTE: if diabetic, don't go here. Very starchy, lots of sugar.

This sushi place is run by mainland Chinese. Nothing wrong with that: very few Japanese sushi chefs would actually open a place like this lol.

Y'all, it was only 18 degrees today, cloudy, and very windy, but the inside was stuffy and hot. When I read reviews here that said it was "cozy", I expected comfortable, not stuffy and unventilated.

Also, the spout on the teapot and the INSIDE of the miso soup bowl were BROKEN and chipped! It is IMPOSSIBLE to clean jagged pieces and rid it of all the bacteria. Gross!

Know what's also gross? The tables were sticky.

Food was meh. Max 3, average 2. The most delicious thing was the circular ham looking thing, and second is specifically the salmon sashimi. Other things were meh.. The ebi sushi was kinda mushy and didn't look like a shrimp shape lol. Taste was rather bland except for the salmon.

Barely any service. We had to hunt down the server to get our order taken, and after she brought out the dishes, she never came back. We also had to hunt her down by leaving our seating area to get the bill.

My biggest gripe is considering that this is a veg place, why is the sashimi and sushi "meat" cut so thin and small? And worse, at the SAME price as real sushi (with real fish) at legit Japanese restaurants? The sashimi size here was less than what I'd get on a sushi roll at like... Miki.

Disappointed for sure. Not sure what everyone's...

I was quite impressed with their selection of vegetarian meats and the quality of replication to real meat. Most vegetarian places that offer vegetarian duck fail to even make the food look anything like real duck in terms of colour or texture. This restaurant did quite well.

They are completely vegetarian (but not vegan) so even their sushi is made without meat. My parents were quite surprised and refused to believe that the sushi was made without real fish since it looked quite like salmon. While everything is vegetarian, they had a much smaller selection of vegan options which I found disappointing. I asked the waitress and it seems like the sauces aren’t always vegan. I think the number of main dishes that could be made vegan could be counted on two hands which isn’t much considering how much they offer on their menu.

Generally, the food was good. It was flavourful, although I found the red curry hericium to be a tad too sweet, though that might have been from all the basil that they used. Also, with the red curry hericium, I found the serving size to be a bit small for the price (normally red curry anything at a non-veg restaurant is ~$8-14, but here it was $16.95). The other items that we ordered were reasonably priced though.

Service was good and the waitress was quite friendly. The restaurant seemed quite clean and there was ample parking space in the area which is...