Butter Chicken Factory

This post is going to be a little bit different, mainly because it isn't Jeff writing but actually me - Tatiana! I've decided to hi-jack his blog and do a little guest blogging of my own of some restaurants I've personally been to but Jeff has yet to visit.

So, this post will focus on Butter Chicken Factory located on Parliament and just south of Wellesley. It's a fairly new restaurant (I'm talking 2 or so years) with a small handful of tables. I've only gone during lunch time but let me tell you, it is so worth it to do so. The reason, their $9.99 lunch special. With it comes - butter chicken, a chickpea curry, a beef curry, rice, naan, and two desserts (pardon my lack of official names).

Now onto the actual review. The food is delicious, especially considering the amount you get and for its value. My favourite is the butter chicken and I always judge a restaurant by its version of this popular curry dish. At Butter Chicken Factory, theirs is creamy without being too heavy. The other curries are also notable, and pack a punch with its spices. The addition of desserts is a nice touch, and the presentation is simple and clean. 

I've never tried the rest of their menu, but it contains all the standards you'd find at any other Indian restaurant. 

The verdict - come for their lunch special. For $9.99, you can't go wrong. I'd personally rate this restaurant an 85%.

Taki Restaurant

Taki Restaurant is probably my most favourite favourite Japanese restaurant in all of Canada that I have tried so far. The owners are japanese, the workers are 80% japanese and the atmosphere is very japanese. The owners are from Shikoku and Hokkaido of Japan. Shikoku is known for its udon dishes and Hokkaido is known for their awesome seafood!

I can't complain about a single dish I have tried on the menu but here are some that I really recommend!
Oyako-don also known in english as parent-child-bowl. This is usually a combination of chicken and egg dishes, however in Hokkaido as they are seafood fanatics they use salmon and salmon roe. This is the salmon lovers delight! The salmon roe that they serve here is different from any other place you'll try. The reason is because they marinate the roe!!! Which is strange because it gives it less of a salty flavour and more of a sweet flavour! The salmon is high quality and the combination is mouth watering. This dish is pricey, but look at what you get! OMG dish for sure.

Now the Taki restaurant has one of the most delicious house dressings I have ever had. It is creamy, fattening, delicious. If you're trying to go on a diet with this, that is impossible. They also sell the dressing by the bottles as it is so popular! Now back to the salad... there are two salads note worth at this restaurant and it is the seafood salad (picture below) and the seaweed salad (kaisou salad). The seaweed salad is beautiful, has 4~6 different seaweeds and looks amazing. The presentation is so good. The seafood salad has squid, octopus, tuna, salmon, roe, seaweed, and regular veggies. You get to pour as much of the house dressing on your salad as you wish!!! ohhh my god it is so good.

Now the taki restaurant has a tapas menu, where many of the expensive items are sold at a cheaper price but in smaller quantities. I got three seperate tatakis, beef, salmon, tuna! They are seared around the edges and served cold! This is my favourite dish as its like sashimi but covered in onions and homemade ponzu sauce. (ponzu sauce is a tangy, zesty soy sauce). One thing to note here at this restaurant is that they make ALL of their sauces home made. (not including soy sauce which they use as their base).

The soft shell crab is quite delicious, as it is at many other restaurants but the ponzu sauce you dip in makes it so good! I love it!

Chicken karaage here is something to note. Even my parents say this is the best karaage they have ever had in their life time. The reason it is so good is because of how lightly battered they are. Which gives it a crispiness but with tons of juiciness. The chicken is marinated before deep frying giving it an even deeper flavour.

The udon here is incredibly good, I always order it when I come. It is absolutely simple and just so good! The broth is Shikoku style and also homemade. It is just so flavourful....

I would love to put more sushi pictures but I do not have any! But I will show you my favourite which is red tuna! Look at the colour, it is so pretty and tastes even better!

This is the main that we got, this is a wafuu style steak dish. The steak is cooked rare, and on top is covered in a radish sauce. This is quite expensive but still very good!

Overall I would rate this place a 94% as this place is fantastic. Best Japanese in town, and in Canada in my opinion. Obviously I haven't even touched 90% of the Japanese restaurants out there but I would only include Japanese run restaurants to be able to contend to this place.

Note worthy things, the prices can get pretty high during dinner times, but the tapas menu and other options give you a cheaper price option if need be! The lunches are extremely affordable as they knock down the prices quite heavily!

If you're going for Japanese and going to Niagara Falls, this is the place to go. I recommend everything that I have had here and more! I will keep adding more and more photos as I go and try different dishes!

Give it a shot!

ZAM

ZAM is a restaurant and bar and I can't believe they are called a restaurant! Haha this was quite funny. We decided to come here as it looked classy from the outside but was located in a very strange place, in between two car dealerships.

We came in at 7, and we were literally the only ones in the restaurant! It was like as if this place was reserved for us personally, and this was quite awkward. We sat down and checked out the menu. This was a Serbian restaurant and had Serbian music playing in the background. This place definitely was a lounge and not a restaurant. I ordered something that really intrigued me, the njeguski steak. This shouldn't be called a steak in my opinion. This was more of a cheese and bacon wrapped in a thinly sliced piece of meat. This was served with mashed potatoes and creamy mushrooms. Tatiana got the calamari dinner and we also got calamari for an appetizer, the difference being one is grilled and the other is deep fried. Overall the food was quite good! I was quite impressed with the calamari. However I was disgusted at the visual presentation of my steak. I'm very sorry for the poor picture quality as we were sitting under a red light and it made the food look horrible. My dish looked like poo wrapped in a circle of puke. hahaaha...

Like I mentioned the calamari was good! the dipping sauce was also quite good!

Now surprisingly the potatoes here were fantastic! Zesty, oily, soft, very good.

Overall I would rate this place 75%, as this place really shouldn't be called a restaurant but more of a bar/lounge that serves food.

If this was a real restaurant, I would perhaps give it an 80%. Why does this matter? well it doesn't but the atmosphere is weird.

Momofuku

Daisho Momofuku is supposedly a japanese restaurant however I have no idea if it is. This had high expectations as I have been told this place is a great ramen house. I looked at the menu and there weren't many ramen options, however there were many other interesting asian dishes as well and that is why I do not think this is Japanese.

However we decided to try this place out and come here for lunch! The restaurant presentation is very good! and it is also 3 stories high. I decided to get the dan-dan ramen, and Tatiana decided to get the Momofuku ramen. Presentation wise the momofuku ramen looked amazing. I really wanted it. However when I tried her ramen I was very disappointed. The reason I was disappointed was because the broth was horrible. The broth tasted something like... fatty pork belly soup. It literally tasted like I got a bowl of water, and cooked a half pound of pork belly in this soup and served it. I'm sure people really enjoy this, however I was expecting something... better. Now in the momofuku ramen was pork belly as well as an egg and seaweed. My ramen was much simpler and the broth was better in my opinion. In the center is a chunk of minced meat with green onions. Now there is one good thing to take away from this place, and it is the noodles! The noodles were great quality, and tasted fantastic. If only the soup was good I would have enjoyed it more.

Overall I would rate this a 65%, highly overrated, pricey for ramen, food was not good as I have experienced alot of ramen in my lifetime and this was one of the worst. So far the best was in Vancouver! I'll have to blog about it sometime too! I will not come back as there are many other ramen huts to try out in Toronto! Yaya!

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu does not have a website so hopefully the word spreads of this place!

My friend recommended a korean restaurant close to Hurontario and Dundas in Mississauga. We accidentally went to this place thinking it was the other place we wanted to go to. The other place we were meant to go to was called WOW.

However this place had the name Soon Tofu in their title so it must be what they are good at right? We looked at the menu and noticed that 60% of the menu was soon tofu, haha. We decided to get it and man was this place amazing for the price or what! The meal is worth less the 8$ and the amount of food you get is incredible!

Sorry for the upright photos but the first photo is of the regular korean appetizers you get. This is standard with many korean restaurants. The second photo is of the soon tofu soup that I got! I got the combination soon tofu which had beef and seafood.

The purple rice that you get with the soon tofu is the good part! I like to put half of my rice in my soup and eat half of it on its own with the appetizers that you get! Here is a picture of half of my rice in my soup! The soon tofu has so much flavour, it is delicious!

At the end you are left with the bowl that the rice came from! What they do is while the bowl is sizzling hot they put hot tea in it and make a congee! You scrape the rest of the rice off and eat it like congee! This has a little bit of burnt flavour and tastes very good!

I have also come here for the bibimbop and that is very disappointing. Their gochujang sauce was not very good. I do not recommend straying off of the soon tofu at this restaurant!

Overall I would rate this place a 90% as the price is fantastic, the food is great, and service is kind! 10$ for all of this is a big hit! This restaurant is always full of koreans too! so you know its good!

The Melting Pot

Melting Pot is an american franchise that specializes in fondue! One opened up about a half year ago in Markham/Richmond Hill off of Highway 7 close to Commerce Gate.

As this was our first time there we decided to go all out! We had the 4 course meal!
Now the meal was pretty interesting because there were many options to choose from!

The first that you can choose from is 3 different kind of salads. I chose the iceberg salad which consisted of literally a 1/4 slice of iceberg lettuce covered in a blue cheese dressing. This was really interesting at first but realized I was just eating lettuce... haha. Tatiana got a blue cheese raspberry walnut salad. This salad was surprisingly really good! The sugar covered walnuts gave it a nice crunch and the blue cheese gave it a distinct stinkyness that I enjoyed!

The second you choose the type of fondue cheese you get. There were about 5 options, 2 of them were wine and 2 of them were beer and one was just a plain no alcohol fondue. Previously we experienced a wine fondue that was overly powerful that pretty much tasted like wine. We had a terrible experience and was deathly afraid of this happening again so we went for the basic no alcohol fondue! This fondue was fantastic! The small chunks of bread were delicious to dip in, the fruits and veggies were interesting but still a different kind of bite. I enjoyed the bread the most as it sucked in the cheese the most! Be careful, it is really hot! But sooo so so so good... mmm...

Now we come to the 3rd dish. The main. This is more of a hot pot style then a fondue but I guess you're still dipping in something which makes it a fondue. The hot pot had 3 different broths and I chose the zesty broth! The hot pot also came with 3 different sets of meats that you can choose from and I decided the surf and turf combo. The hot pot broth was very zesty and very good! The meats were pretty tasty as well as you can see there were tons of different dipping sauces to choose from! The choices! However I had one huuuuge huge issue. The meats were marinated previously and many of them had salts on them already. This by itself made it salty. When you cook it in the broth it makes it even more saltier as it absorbs the broth flavour. The best were the chicken and beef as they were the least salty however the shrimp and lobster was almost inedible. I did complain that they over seasoned it and they apologized.

Now finally comes the 4rth and final act. The chocolate dessert fondue! We mentioned that this was our 8th anniversary meal so they came out with some fireworks! Like I mentioned in my personal review of myself I am not a big fan of sweats. This was something Tatiana really enjoyed! Overall the desserts were good and I did enjoy the white chocolate side of the fondue better!

Overall I would rate this place an 84%! Delicious food, good presentation, classy people, expensive prices (if you don't mind). I would definitely come back again as there aren't many melting pots in Canada.

I can't really understand the rating at 59%. I understand that this place is expensive, some people get bad service (dependent on the server) however overall going through the 4 course meal was a good experience! Eating that between two people was quite tough but I toughed it out! Anyways I do recommend this place for first time goers! Great date place.