Perfect Chinese Restaurant — Restaurant in Toronto

The most affordable dim sum in Toronto has to be at Perfect Chinese Restaurant: on weekdays most dishes are $2 rising to $2.2in their “VIP” room, weekends all standard dishes are $2.2. Of course, they do have certain “special” items peddled from the dim sum carts, but theses are still $3 or less. Even the customary tea charge is only $0.60 per person. If there’s a place that’s cheaper, I certainly haven’t found it.

Even with the low prices, the quality of Perfect’s dim sum is good and certain dishes even larger than competitors. So how do they do it? You’ll find out the moment you pull into the old neglected plaza and sit down in their dated dining room – the surroundings aren’t palatial, but the low rent and passé décor means savings in your pocket.

Perfect has such a large selection it’d be impossible to highlight even half of their offerings in this post. Instead, this will focus on the dim sum that’s particularly good, bad or I find special as it’s hard to find elsewhere.

Stepping away from the “hamburger” method of providing feedback, we’ll start with the poorly constructed dishes. Their nuggets of tofu and fish paste ($2) has an awful mushy and sticky consistency. Save for some saltiness from the sauce, they lack flavour and are forgettable. Moreover, their pork & dried vegetable congee ($2) is gritty from the poorly soaked vegetable, so I’d stick with the chicken & corn version instead.

Luckily, they have a lot of good offerings. When the steamed shrimp and scallop dumpling ($2.20) is hot (a shame they’re not served covered in bamboo steamers), these umami laced dumplings are fantastic and beat the traditional har gow any day. Aside from seafood, the filling contains diced celery adding a lovely refreshing crunch to the dumpling.

If you’re a fan of ham shuy gok, the oval crispy orbs filled with minced pork, the shrimp version is worth a try. Shaped like crescents, inside is a fair amount of shrimp dressed up with chives. The crisp slightly sweet glutinous coating is similar to what’s used in the popular pork dish.

Getting a clay pot of their regular rice ($2) will require luck as they’re generally gone by the time the cart arrives to your table (people go to the cart). If you don’t like hunting down the food, splurge on the baked seafood ($3) one that arrives piping hot with a creamy shrimp, scallop and squid sauce on top of fried rice.

Their fried quail ($2.75) is a steal for a dish that takes so much preparation (brining, drying and then cooking). It’s well marinated for flavour and deep fried giving the skin a crispiness similar to Peking duck but the fowl meat juicier.

You can find pan-fried turnip ($2) or taro cake ($2) anywhere, but Perfect still uses the old fashioned cooking carts giving you a hotter dish. Moreover, they really take the time to allow a golden crust to develop and if you ask nicely you can mix-and-match any three pieces from the savoury turnip & taro or sweet chestnut offerings.

For dessert you really should try their steamed glutinous dumplings filled with red bean paste ($2). Sometimes it can be hard to rip off the bamboo leaf wrapped around it, but the chewy soft dessert is very tasty. The steamed custard roll ($2.20) is also a nice choice, the fluffy light sponge cake smeared with a thick egg custard – a light but...

My party of 10 booked a private room to enjoy the mahjong table and karaoke system. We had an awesome time there and will go back again on our next visit to Toronto area! The food was not the best Chinese food - it was mediocre - we were okay with it, since we went to this place for the other entertainment. I did call to reserve the room a month in-advance and had to send a $100 CAD deposit to hold the small private room, and as we went on a Thursday, we had to spend at least $400 CAD on the food, which we exceeded. For the deposit, I had to use Paysend to send the money, as we are in the US and don't have a Canada bank account, and they wanted an e-transfer (similiar to Zelle). You can choose your own dishes and not go with one of the meal packages - we had to ask for the actual menu (and we did provide a written list to the server, to make it easier). As we wanted to use the electronic mahjong table, we had to give a $100 CAD deposit after we arrived (in cash) - to make sure we don't break it or steal the tiles. As for the karaoke system, we never experienced any feedback issues, the volume was good, and it does have English and Chinese songs. However, the system's screen is in Chinese - luckily, my SIL is able to read Chinese and found the screen to scroll through the songs to find the English ones, but you cannot search specific song titles or artist names - you will need to scroll every screen. As for the service, in general, the servers were really great, but the initial person that seated us (unsure if he was a manager, server, or host), he was rude and abrupt with his manners, but good thing that all the other people we communicated with afterwards were very nice and helpful. We stayed until close to midnight, as the private rooms close at midnight (the rest of the restaurant is 24 hours) - was told that if we stayed after midnight, there would be a fee. Overall experience was good - will be back...

Went into this place with high expectations because someone had reviewed it and said it was amazing. Theestablishment isn’t very clean. OK look past that because I was excited to have the garlic lobster. They have some hidden special menu that they don’t give you so we had to ask about it and then the waiter brought it out, it included a meal combo for $99 which included lobster, vegetables, beef and rice, he said there would be three lobsters and it would be enough food for all of us, so we took his suggestion and put our order in. As we waited for quite some time looking around the ceiling had dirt particles just hanging off of it, the fan just above our table also was dirty and had dust just hanging off of it. My friend had a fly fall into her tea from the ceiling. And we waited and waited and waited and waited and waited, we were there at least an hour and a half and still hadn’t been served and seeing all the people around us being served except us. When we asked about it the waiter explained that we ordered from the thai and there were only three thai chefs in the back and all the other people around us apparently ordered from the Chinese menu and the was 13 Chinese chefs and that’s why they were being served before us, not a great way to run your business. When we finally got our food in increments of half hour each spread apart i.e. we got our vegetables, first half hour later we got our beef, half hour later we got a lobster and noodles. The vegetables were pretty good, the beef was not bad the noodles were bland and the lobster was a huge disappointment. The Lobsters must have been so small, can hardly get good meat out of it, there were only three claws and he said there were three lobsters? Over all I will not come back….service was horrible, food was at best mediocre and the place is not very clean. Did not take any photos cause but he time the food came we were so...