Win's Seafood Restaurant

Review Location:
50 Lockridge Ave, Unit 1
Markham, ON

My family came here for dinner one night because there was some set dinner for 8 that was supposed to be a really good deal. You'll soon see from the pictures that it was A LOT of food and was enough for at least 10 people. The restaurant is like a typical chinese restaurant, with the round tables, white table cloths and squishy seats. Definitely nothing too fancy.  In fact, the insulation in the place was terrible because it was freezing despite there being heat on. Anyways, I noticed a certificate on the wall close to where we were sitting showing that the cook graduated from George Brown college. So at first I was kind of excited to try the Chinese food that would come out of a Canadian culinary school graduate. After the meal I realized that in fact there was quite a bit of western influence in the meal.

 appetizer: salted fish and peanuts

  bean curd sand meat soup. (WAYYY too peppery. Did not enjoy this at all.)

 Stir fried Lobster

 Stir fried button mushrooms and scallops with garlic

Left: Rum and butter seafood stew pot, Right: Baguette to go with the stew pot

 Sea cucumber, Chinese mushrooms and vegetables

 Steamed fish with soya sauce

 Stir fried button mushrooms and scallops in garlic

Stir fry snap peas with sea cucumber, white fungus, and king mushroom

 Stir fry leek and oysters

Rack of Lamb

 3 dessert options at the end of dinner: 

Black sesame dessert, Puree Almond dessert, and Taro Tapioca dessert. The Taro Tapioca dessert had the large tapioca balls! 

I'm not going to go through each dish this time like I normally do, because I feel like my thoughts on each dish are about the same. In generally everything was very savory (which probably came from the Canadian/Western cooking influence). The ingredients, the sauce, the flavours, everything. And while savory is not necessary a bad thing, it's a little too much when every dish is equal in intensity. You kind of need that more neutral bland dish to counteract it, but in this case there wasn't any. The lamb was a savory meat to begin with, and was drenched in a very rich in barbeque sauce, while the seafood stew was very heavy in butter flavourings. Even the vegetable dishes (which there were very few) were covered with more meat and seafood, which was stir fried in a salty and very thick sauce. But that's not to say the dishes weren't tasty. By themselves, each dish had relatively fresh ingredients and plentiful proportions. They didn't skimp out on the expensive ingredients either. My favourite dish which was the mushrooms and scallops, had equally as much scallops as it did mushrooms.

While it wouldn't be my first choice to come here again, I wouldn't write it off as a place I refuse to go to. I just personally wouldn't order all these dishes together at the same time again.