My Wonderful Kitchen — Restaurant in Richmond Hill

This is a very busy & popular dim sum restaurant, especially on the weekends. We went yesterday (Sunday) morning just before 10 am. It was already quite busy. By the time we left (11:30 am), there was a huge line of people waiting to get in. You take a ticket number and just wait for them to call you in. There are no reservations at all. It's all walk-ins.

Before 11 am, the Small, Medium, and Large plates are all $5 (it's some kind of special promotion that is going on right now - I am not able to read Chinese, but my mom translated it to me). We ordered the Egg Tarts (3 PC), Chicken Pastry w/ Curry Sauce (4 PC), BBQ Pork Buns (3 PC), Steamed BBQ Pork Rice Roll (3 PC), Steamed Angus Beef Rice Roll (3 PC), Steamed Rice Rolls w/Fried Dough (comes with the sauce), Soya Bean Pudding (comes with a sweet & ginger syrup), Lotus Seed Paste & Salted Egg Yolk Sago Tart (4 PC), Beef Balls (4 PC), Steamed Chicken Feet (3 PC), Steamed Salty Egg Yolk Creamy Buns (3 PC), Siu Mai (Steamed Pork Dumplings, 4 PC), Har Gow (Shrimp Dumplings, 4 PC), Steamed Beef Tripe w/Ginger & Scallion, and Jasmine/some other tea that I couldn't get the translation of ($2.50, including hot water).

First and foremost most: This was the best dim sum we've had in a very long time. The food was high quality and very delicious, flavorful, seasoned just right. The only thing we weren't pleased about is that we found an eyelash in our Lotus Seed Paste & Salted Egg Yolk Tart. And the waitress that we flagged down gave us a terrible excuse that it was just one of the brushes hair that got loose and got caught into the tart. Um, no, that hair is literally combined with the tart itself. We just ended up cutting out the chunk of the tart out and tossing it to the side.

The egg tart is crispy and flaky. The duck is cute and it's a marshmallow (a gimmick, not tasty if you don't like marshmallows). The chicken pastry's curry sauce perfectly compliments the sweet outer layer. Savoury and sweet. I was told that the BBQ pork buns were very tasty, sweet, homemade, scrumptious. My family ate it all before I got to have any. The rice rolls had fresh vegetables inside of them, and one of them didn't have a pasty type of mushy meat filling inside. The Chinese doughnut rice rolls came with the sauce. The rolls themselves were fresh, not stale. The soya bean pudding was smooth, however for me, the syrup was a bit to sweet. The lotus seed paste & salted egg yolk sago tart was sweeter than expected, but was actually pretty good (excluding the eyelash hair we found - disgusting). The beef balls were soft, moist, and juicy. The chicken feet was my favorite. It's not spicy like other variants. There's peanuts in this dish. The egg yolk bun has googly eyes on it (it's chocolate). The siu mai was tender and juicy. The har gow's shrimp was plump and the skin was chewy. The beef tripe was another one of my favorites. Chewy and just the right amount of flavor and salt. The tea was the neutral party, balancing the flavors and cleansing the palate.

There's barely any waiters/waitresses so they're running themselves ragged, back and forth. The restaurant is increasingly becoming full fast and rather busy. The service is slowly becoming terrible over time. Somehow and somewhere, more employees show up out of nowhere.

Overall, good food. Service isn't that good. Found hair in food. Waitress lied. Have photo proof. Will upload a photo of the dim sum menu later. One thing to note is that we were very thirsty after eating here...

“ My-Wonderful-Kitchen, Richmond Hill; aka ‘ Michelin’ in Cantonese “ - What a meal!......Food quality, death spiraled down like a star being sucked into a black hole as the dinner progressed!

Based on past reputation, for our weekly family dinner gathering, we have high hopes and anticipation in selecting this popular refined Cantonese cuisine eatery for our venue. Our meal started off with a spectacular bang that featured a wonderfully executed and delightfully enjoyable ‘ Roasted Suckling Piglet Platter ‘. The wafer textured, ultra-crisp skin was superb. The Seaweed and Jellyfish accompaniment, well seasoned and delicious. Easily one of the best Roasted Suckling Piglets in the GTA.

The follow up dish of an uncommon ‘ Tea smoked premium soy poached free range chicken ‘ was dramatically presented at our table…..influenced by tonight’s Oscar presentation? Ha! The smokiness and taste profile of both the sauce and chicken was enticing. A top-notched chicken dish!

Though nothing special, the ‘ Seafood Faux Crab meat ‘ dish was run-of-the-mill acceptable, the portion quite generous. Sadly, the meal dropped off the cliff and spiraled quickly downwards from there!

The supposedly crunchy/crisp ‘ Fried Oyster with Golden Garlic and Honey Pepper Glaze ‘ lacked crispiness being replaced by an excessively wet batter layer with mushy sponge-like texture.

The ‘ Sauteed Angus Beef Cubes with Thai Basil ‘ was void of any desired wok-hay element. The taste profile was overwhelmed by an overpowering 'Celery' aroma and taste component despite none were present in the dish. The meat was unexpectedly rough and chewy. And…BTW…..where’s the Basil?.....we tasted none!

The ‘ Stirred Fry Gai-Lan ( Chinese Kale ) with Sun Dried Tile Fish ‘ was bland and also lacked the oomph of wok-hay goodness. A sad rendition of the exceptionally tasty creation made famous by O’Mei.

The deterioration of quality culminated in a disastrous finale! An ‘ OFF ‘ Dessert Soup of Diced Taro and Tapioca ‘ that was lukewarm and tasted....stale and sour!! Yeeuck!! No apologies were given when a complaint was launched discretely to the manager!

PS: They charge an exorbitant $48 for a pre-ordered Roasted Pigeon, when the average price for such a dish by their neighborhood competitors is only $38!!!........and you all know what...

Expensive for what you get…

We have heard a lot of good things about this restaurant. So we gave it a try. The combo menu was the best deal as ordering anything from the main menu was ridiculously expensive. We decided on the dinner combo; that’s where you get to pick one dish from the “A” list, another dish from the “B” list, then two or more items from the “C” list.

We ordered the braised beef rib from list A, steamed eel from list B, and pork chop with Chinese vinegar sauce and sweet and sour pork from list C.

The dinner started off with a corn soup. That was really, really good. It is basically chicken stock with cream of corn soup with some fish stomach pieces added in. Very nicely done.

Our favourite was the braised beef rib which was super tender; the sauce was sweet and very tasty. The steamed eel was also good; it didn’t have the “muddy earthy” taste which means it was cleaned well. The sweet and sour pork was good but needed to be fried longer to make it crispier; the flavour was not too vinegary which was nice. The least favourite was the pork chop. It was tough and waaay too salty for our liking. If we could redo our order, that would have been the dish to replace.

I noticed the chef added MSG to some of our dishes. So, if you are sensitive to MSG, we warned.

Dessert was a red bean soup, almond cookies, and mango jello. This tasted watered down. It wasn’t too sweet but no real bean flavour. It was also missing the dried tangerine peel flavour, which probably would have saved the dessert. Definitely a thumbs down on that one. The cookies were just ok and mango jello was too sweet.

I would recommend skipping the dessert here and going to another restaurant to finish the meal.

The price was expensive for what you get. The plating is fairly standard with little to no decorations. The portions were not overly large. Our bill came out to $150 after taxes and tip. To be perfectly honest, the food was just ok but definitely not worth $30 per dish.

I would try them for dimsum or lunch, which seems more reasonably priced.

If you want something slightly better than normal class, this is a good treat once in a while. But there are definitely better restaurants you can go to...