Salateen Restaurant — Restaurant in Montreal

Having recently moved back home to Montreal from living near Toronto for many years, I am still exploring and getting to know the city once again, including the things that are new.

In the Toronto region, Indian and Pakistani food is good and abundant, so it's a delight to find excellent, reasonably priced restaurants offering items from that region here now.

A few types of cuisine are not well represented, particularly Hakka Chinese, so I am always eager to try any restaurant's Chili Chicken. Indian and Pakistani restaurants have a different take on Chili Chicken from Hakka Chinese, but it can still be very good, and Salateen certainly makes a good Pakistani-style version.

Like Pakistani food I am accustomed to, the Chili Chicken here is a little on the oily side compared with Indian or Chinese versions, and the complexity of the spicing is somewhere in-between. The Chinese version relies much more on soy sauce and green chilis for flavouring as well.

However, despite the server's misgivings, I asked for extra spicy. It did indeed have raw chopped green chili peppers as a garnish, and was nice and spicy, though a bit mild compared with Federick Restaurant's version in Toronto, which is so hot it feels like the top of your head is lifting off!

The flavour was excellent, the price quite reasonable and the naan seemed to have been properly tandoori-baked.

One can get better South Asian food at a few special places in Montreal, but at a considerably greater cost.

Salateen deserves a top rating nonetheless because it provides excellent fare at a reasonable price in a clean locale with very attentive and...

Owner cheated with us.

We called before going and owner told us it is a buffet (all you can eat) for $16.99. Even after going there, we confirmed before sitting.

Once food came, and we asked for more starters/desert, owner and serving person changed their words and they told us it is limited. We can have one item only once. Moreover, he didn’t even give all the items which he told us prior to order.

Another issue was the owner was the quality of the food. It was worst I had in Montreal so far. All gravies were sweet and tasteless. The best dish we had was water. Everything was so poor and owner was so rude when we asked to change the curry or select something else. Basically, he gave us $8 thali with $2 appetizers for $16.99 and befooled us with the name of “all you can eat”. This is the first all you can eat buffet where you can’t order again. While we were eating, someone on other table choked by their food.

Service on other hand was not upto the mark either. Water was never asked after first time and waitress passed some comments (like how much would you eat) when we asked for desert.

In the end, waitress (or May be lady owner) charged us $5 extra. When we asked the reason, she replied that it’s extra government tax.

This kind of behaviour (specially cheating) and food ruined our Sunday.

I will highly recommend others to avoid this place.

On another note, there were no Covid measures. Owner was not using mask and he never asked us for vaccine passport (which is against Quebec Law). It was very unsafe that he was not asking anyone for the...

Wow, what a disgrace! I am absolutely horrified by the quality of their food and service. My family and I are not incredibly judgemental about the food we order, as long as it tastes/looks close to how it is described in the menu. Knowing Salateen has a problem with serving dishes that taste similar, we ordered the 2 most different kinds of curries where 1 was shrimp, and 1 was beef. However, we were utterly taken aback by what we received. The EXACT same gravy(colour and flavour) was used to make both dishes and the shrimps were the size of peas! Mind you, none of the same ingredients were written in the menu to describe these dishes. Also, almost no beef or shrimp could be found in the sea of disgusting gravy that they served. You'd think after such a long time of waiting, at least the rice would be ingestible...but it was so dry and stale, we were convinced it was yesterday's leftovers. We were obliged to ask them to take it back and to please serve us rice that wasn't as hard as rocks. If I could give -100 as a rating, I would. Really sad that this is how we spent a family dinner. They have no respect about what they serve to their customers, I wouldnt be surprised if the kitchen was unclean as well, considering the dirty utensils/plates they put on the tables. AVOID AT ALL COSTS, save your money,...