This seems to be a local lunch hot-spot for people who work in the Vieux Port area of Montreal. I would describe it as upscale Asian lunch-line food, with Chinese-Thai-Vietnamese inspired fare. In other words, confused. Don't expect experimental cuisine, but hopefully you can expect a decent meal for your unsophisticated Western palette.
I went here on two occasions, the first being for Poutine Week. I ordered their advertised Shaolin Poutine two weeks ago for the fair price of $10. What I got were crispy fries, a whole lot of delicious vegetables (peppers, onions, button mushrooms, some green onion slivers), panko-encrusted golden pork globules, cheese curds, and Asian-inspired gravy. While the gravy wasn't the best tasting thing I've ever had (something about sesame oil or peanut sauce and cheese just don't mix) I do have to admit that the dish was deliciously light. Whenever you eat poutine, your stomach usually ends up feeling likes it's carrying a ton of bricks because the dish is so fatty. After I ate the Shaolin, though, I felt great. For this reason alone I would order it again rather than a traditional poutine in order to satisfy my craving for that heavenly dish. Unfortunately, the Shaolin didn't make it to the regular menu.
The second time I went to Sesame, I ordered the Peanut Chicken. Bleh. Never again. First of all, the dish was more full of rice than anything else. The sauce was indeed tasty, peanut-y and rich, but the chicken tasted weird. In fact, it tasted like those Maple Leaf chicken breasts you used to buy from the grocery store, and once you got to cooking it you'd realize that all you paid for was water weight because it would all gush out of the breasts and into the pan. The weirdest part, though, was that it would have this greyish tint, and you'd feel like Maple Leaf gypped you by injecting the meat with water just to make the meat heavier and you would have to pay more, but for less! So much less! I mean, I know many chicken manufacturers do that, but they kind of know their limits. Not Maple Leaf. Leafie thought it knew better. The chicken would take old and flavourless, the grey watery broth was vomit-inducing, and you just wanted to cry yourself to sleep in the kitchen corner out of hopeless surrender. No thank you, Maple Leaf, no thank you.
Didn't Maple Leaf go bankrupt??
Did I say "Maple Leaf" enough times in this post?
ADDRESS: 380 St Jacques St W, Montreal, QC
No comments:
Post a Comment