Aunty's Kitchen - Waterloo — Restaurant in Waterloo

After moving to waterloo recently and being in quarantine, I heard about aunty’s kitchen a lot from my friends who asked me to try it out for south east asian foods. Up till now I have tried their:

Butter Chicken with Naan: Way too good. Simply delicious. Would definitely be ordering it again and also be recommending it to others. However, I didn’t like the rice that came with the butter chicken as they lacked flavour and were a lil’ bit hard to chew.

Lahori Fish: I liked it. The spices were well-balanced and the fish was freshly fried.

Gulab Jamun: They were good too.

Nihari: I liked it. It was fresh and the meat was soft (as it should be). My only suggestion would be to serve it with complimentary nihari condiments like sliced lemon, peppers, fried onions and thinly sliced ginger etc as these would add more value and authenticity to the dish.

Chicken Tikka with Biryani Rice: I really liked the combo. The biryani and tikkas were fresh and flavoursome.

Kheer: I would call it a “go back” dish as I would definitely be going back to Aunty’s Kitchen for it. The creamy flavours of the kheer with coarsely ground texture, neither too sweet nor too bland and the rich khoya/milky taste is worth trying. I would definitely be ordering it again and also be recommending it to others.

Cheese Naan: It was a bit disappointing as the cheese naans that we get back home i.e., Pakistan have a crispy exterior and a soft interior with rich cheesy filling (as soon as you take a morsel the cheese starts flowing out of the naan. Besides this, they have a very light blend of spices which perfectly compliments the cheese). On the contrary, the cheese naan that Aunty’s Kitchen made was nothing like this. It was a thin naan/roti with a bit of mozzarella cheese filling. The naan tasted fine but wasn’t worth 10$.

Paratha: Aunty’s Kitchen doesn’t make home-cooked parathas. It just pan-cooks the ready-made frozen CD- sized parathas. It was a disappointing experience as I wasn’t expecting a 2$ paratha to be a heated frozen-paratha. I wouldn’t recommend the parathas.

With that being said, my overall experience is good. The restaurant actually calls to explain what it can / can’t entertain if you have mentioned any special instructions in the online app. I also received a cute hand-written...

This is a tiny little restaurant in the University Plaza. Awesome location to attract the student crowd. Maybe I shouldn't call this a restaurant because it is really very similar to fast food places where you serve yourself. They have a wall covered in QR codes, which gives it a pretty modern (more like geeky) appearance.

The service is fast and efficient. It is not like a typical Pakistani/Indian mom and pop place. They have a TV to display the menu which is great since they show you the daily special (which changes everyday). There is not much space indoors as they could only fit in two tables for 2 and one table for 4 people.

I had the large Biryani plate for $7+tax. It was pretty spicy...I didn't expect that. However the flavours were awesome and the quantity was generous, in fact "generous" wouldn't do justice to the huge plate that I got. The rice was not the aromatic basmati which is used in authentic Biryanis, it was a normal long grain rice... but you know what, at $7 I am not going to complain.

The service at the counter was great too. My friend asked for a combo meal (which includes salad and drink for $3 extra) and for some reason they only charged him for a drink. When time came to get our food we noticed the error but the server was quite nice and gave him both the salad and the drink. They have a terrific business idea here of catering great tasting food with huge portions to the hungry student crowd. I hope they continue to deliver as they did! I will definitely try out some other dishes whenever I...

I have ordered food from Dessert Shack twice and they have never let me down!! Both times we have ordered through Uber Eats after midnight and it was a great late night snack. The first time we ordered the 4 Slice Cheesecake Combo, a strawberry shake and 2 Cookie Dough Ben and Jerry's ice cream and a candle. We only ordered the candle to get our order over $50 to get $20 off our purchase. Sadly, they forgot to give us our candle! But it didn't ruin the night. The cheesecake was amazing and my friends told me the strawberry shake was soooo good.

Last night we ordered another cookie dough ben and jerry's ice cream, 2 chocolate shakes and we even got 2 free slices of cheesecake for ordering over $12 on UberEats! We were able to pick from 2 slices of cheesecake, 2 cupcakes, ben and jerry's or 2 different types of merch socks for Dessert Shack.

We got a great amount of dessert for the amount of money that we paid. On top of that, they gave us a very cute note on our food bag thanking us for ordering from them and hoping I am staying safe and having a great night.

Pros: great dessert kind employees go above and beyond for their customers great availability/hours

Ways to improve make sure to give the full order wait time is sometimes...