Beijing Legend — Restaurant in Ottawa

I’ll be nice and bump the 2.5 to a 3 star.

I come from Toronto and of course it wouldn’t be fair to compare the 2. However, if the typical tester dishes suck.....I wouldn’t take pride in it being anywhere near authentic. My typical tester dishes include the rice to see if they cooked it right, a simple sweet sour pork to see whether they’re good at the balance of ingredients and to check if they use fresh ingredients.

I ordered 3 dishes: Yangchow Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Pork, and General Tao Chicken.

Let’s start with fried rice. I can make this at home....but what sets apart homemade fried rice and restaurant fried rice.....is the “wok hei” which legit translates to Wok air...Aka Wok Flavor. Wok flavor is the taste and smell of a Smokey flavour that comes from the wok frying technique where food actually gets tossed next to the flame from the stove. It’s what sets restaurant and authentic flavour from home or average Joe FR. Their rice had none of that. The saddest looking fried rice I’ve ever seen EVEN in the most fake Chinese restaurants in Toronto. Rice legit tasted like a TFal pan fried rice from last night with bits of dried Cha Siu and baking soda shrimpies. Inconsistent with the salt because certain bites were hella salty and certain bites were not salty.

Their sweet and sour pork is passable. Good balance of veggies to pork. It’s not bloodshot red like others I’ve tried in Ottawa, and perfect tang. However, I can tell they douse the meat in a bunch of meat tenderizer or the cheaper version is baking soda. I know this cuz I do it to some of my meat and the first time I used baking soda, I messed up and put it in for too long and it had this ammonia taste....which was very strong between the sweet and sour pork and the chicken. That was very offputting.

General Tao chicken was alright. Nice flavour and strong in garlic which I like. But same thing with the weird ammonia taste in the meat. It was REALLY dry. Perhaps it was because I had asked for them to fry it extra crispy so I’ll dismiss that. But that weird taste in the meat I just can’t get over. Typically I’m not a fan of general Tao at all, and theirs definitely confirmed my dislike of that particular dish.

Of course the no brainer is to order from Chinatown and I’ve yet to do that and I legit can’t wait to taste a bit of...

This place is so underrated in this city on Google Reviews, I don't really understand why.

Their main food is fine, we've had a banquet dinner there once before which had some mixed dishes but overall was okay for this city.

Where Beijing Legend gets it right is their dim sum. There is nowhere better in the city for dim sum. Period, full stop. Hung Sum may have been in contention before but having gone again recently, their quality seems to have taken a bit of a dip (the chiu chow dumplings were frankly a bit stinky and the wrappers for everything were a bit thicker than I remembered previously, though everything else was mostly still good). Meanwhile, I've been to Beijing Legend numerous times with multiple people, and finally went back for the first time post-pandemic a few weeks ago and for the most part, it hasn't lost a step.

Their har gows do fall apart a bit, and the beef cheung fun didn't taste so great this time, but everything else was great and as consistent as it always has been. And this place is second to none for variety in the city when it comes to dim sum. The taro puffs were delicious, the ginger and green onion squid was cooked to perfection, no chewiness whatsoever. The egg tarts had the multiple layers of pastry that they should.

Honestly, I think this place really deserves more credit in this city, even just for the egg tarts alone as the only place that seems to actually make egg tarts themselves and do it well. Ng's Cuisine is too greasy when it comes to their dim sum, Hung Sum is solid but recently wasn't so good, Yangtze is decent if you just have a quick dim sum craving, Oriental Chu Shing, YiMin and Ha's don't even bother. Are there better places in Toronto? Tons. But for Ottawa, this is as...

These people have no morals, ethics or compassion. We ordered a meal through skip the dishes. The driver from skip picked up the wrong order and delivered the wrong order to our hotel. This was both Skip the dishes and the restaurants fault for not checking the order before leaving the restaurant. We had already been waiting over an hour until this point when my wife called the restaurant (while messaging skip to see what could be done to get our order) and asked them to do the right thing and deliver our order. We were waiting in the lobby with our four young kids all under the age of 10. The guy (who speaks proper English and completely understood what was going on) from Beijing Legend told my wife that they would send one of their own drivers and that it would be there in “10 mins” after taking the hotel address and phone number from her (the hotel staff confirmed they also heard the whole conversation as it was on speaker phone). After another 45 mins passed I called the restaurant and they refused to send the order stating that the fault laid with Skip and the “contact their customer service”. Instead of just sending the food like they promised, these dishonest, cheap, insensitive people let our $100+ order go to waste (or likely resold it to some unsuspecting customer) and left us to starve (2 adults and 4 children ages 1 to 9) shameful to say the least. God is watching and these people will get what they deserve for allowing babies and kids to starve like they did. For those who support these people, remember you are dealing with cheap and dishonest people who give honest Chinese restaurants a bad name. Shame on you...