Ottawa Foodies

Stopped in at Brother Wu last week alone around 11:30am for lunch as I was in the area. There was no one in the restaurant I wasn't even greeted with a smile or politely by the grumpy man at the door. I sat down and asked for a pot of green tea and a bottled water. This man was in such a foul mood the entire time I was in disbelief.

Anyway he shows up with a warm bottle of water and asks if it is ok I said no thank you I'll just have the tea. I ordered the lunch special. The spring roll was good. The wonton soup was good but served lukewarm which was disappointing. The beef and broccoli was good, the chicken fried rice was good as well as the spicy chicken and vegetables. I would return.

My only complaint was the grumpy man who obviously isn't very friendly or good at customer service and the lukewarm soup. Everything else tasted good.

Contrary to my experience from a few weeks ago, we ordered from Brother Wu's last night and were gravely dissapointed!

We ordered:
- hot and sour soup (the best of the order by far)
- fried potstickers (fine but nothing special)
- vegetable chow mein (absolutely absymal! The dish comprised of only bean sprouts and some fried crunchy bits. Wtf?!?! It was absolutely tasteless and at $7.50, utter robbery!)
- shrimp in black bean sauce (utter disappointment. Shrimps were way overcooked and came with green and red peppers and way-too-many onions. At $13, another case of robbery)
- Buddha's delight vegetables (fine, at least they weren't overcooked)

All in all, pretty depressing and a total waste of tastebuds and money. The total was $53 - completely unjustifiable.

I think Brother Wu has existed for some time now -- likely longer than the decades when my family and I first immigrated from China.

I hadn't eaten there in a long time but always recalled the food being good.

So I had take-out last night and it was very satisfying. While I opted to get some typical Western-style Chinese, it totally hit the spot.

- chicken fried rice (note: BW's price is $6 cheaper than the nearby Mandarin Ogilvie)
- garlic spare ribs
- shrimp and scallops with veggies

My ONLY criticism would be that the scallops were chopped up and not cooked whole but perhaps they wanted the dish to cook evenly.

All three dishes were flavourful and not oily, like some Chinese restos tend to do.

Yum yum yum all the way.

Our foodie friend recommended us to have lunch here after our 2-hour hiking at Gatineau Park. She told us that this place has been renovated and the inside looks clean and comfortable (not like before) and the food they tried was good.

So, we set our foot here to try their food again after many years. The owner was there (you can bump into him every weekend at Kowloon Market).

The service was pretty good. Our tea pot was re-filled with hot water very frequently. We were pleased with our meal.

The menu price was very reasonable. It cost us $11 each person for lunch. Good price! We will be back to try their Peking duck.

P.S. The photo shown was the complimentary appetizer (pickled vegetables). Very tasty.

I stopped here for dinner for the first time Saturday night.

We were given a regular menu plus a one-page menu of combos to choose from. The options listed looked pretty good, so we didn't even look at the larger menu.

For $14.95 you get one spring roll and a wonton soup to start, followed by the chosen combo.

My choice was shredded pork in spicy sauce, chicken with cashews and chicken-fried rice.

The spring rolls were piping hot and very tasty. They were served with a sweet plum sauce (I would have preferred a sweet chili sauce).
The wonton soup came in a small portion but still had several slices of pork and about 4 perfect wontons in it.
The shredded pork in spicy sauce had a nice bite to it, just spicy enough. The chicken and cashews was really tasty also, and both dishes had the perfect amount of sauce so that they weren't swimmng in gloopy liquid. Even the chicken fried rice was good, and everything on the plate was piping hot (I think I burned my mouth twice!). Sis had beef with broccoli, and garlic ribs with chicken-fried rice on her plate.
It was surprising that everything was so good since the dining room was almost full, and the delivery guy was kept hopping shuttling takeouts the whole time. There seemed to be some chaos in the kitchen, we saw a couple of orders come out that were dropped at the wrong table or the server didn't seem to know quite where it was supposed to go. Portions were generous...I had half of my plate boxed to go (made a great breakfast Sunday morning) and every table seemed to have a brown paper bag of leftovers to bring home.
For straight-up Chinese food this seems like a good place to go. The only thing negative that I could say is that it took a while to get our bill, but as my sister commented "If the food is this good when everything is going wrong, it must be good all the time."

I finally tried their Peking Duck. To my knowledge, making Peking Duck (or any BBQ duck/pork/geese) requires a proper stove and many Chinese restaurants do not have those stoves in their kitchens. I remember I heard about the staff at the BBQ counter at Kowloon Market Kowloon Market talked about the BBQ order from Yangtze Yangtze. So, I believe that if you order BBQ pork/duck from most of the Chinese restaurants, they must be either from Kowloon Market or Double Happiness.

Anyway, Brother Wu doesn't have the stove to make Peking Duck either. However, the chef made their Peking Duck in-house. Their version is to make the duck skin crispy by deep-frying (I have tried this type of Peking Duck in a Chinese restaurant in Toronto). The taste wasn't bad at all. The skin was very cripsy.

If you want to order Peking Duck from Brother Wu, make sure you call them one day in advance and tell them you are going to order Peking Duck. (Also, if you want to order Lobster, make sure to call them one day in advance.)

You don't need to have rice with the Chinese dishes when you are at Brother Wu. This is the golden bread roll (i.e., deep fried roll). We ordered two plates of golden bread rolls and we dipped the bread in the sauce from the dishes. Yum! Try it!

P.S. Their menu has gold and silver bread roll. Gold refers to deep-fry and silver refers to steamed bread roll. We like it deep-fried! When you go to a Chinese restaurant that is specialized in dumplings, xiao long bao or Shanghainese noodles, don't forget to order their gold bread rolls.

Brother Wu's Stuffed Bean Curd with eggplant was excellent although one friend said that the bean curd was not elastic (or gelatin-like) enough. (My friend is a good cook at home and she has high demand of Chinese food. I told her not to demand too much in Ottawa.)

Next time I will order this dish again.

Zha Jiang mian (炸醬麵) is also called Ja Jiang mian where mian means noodles in Chinese. This is the Northern Chinese version of Italian spaghetti, but mixed with minced pork, sweet noodle sauce, hoisin sauce, hot bean paste, soy sauce, sesame oil together in a bowl. When the noodles are brought to your table, the ingredients are placed on top of the noodles and you have to mix the ingredients well yourself. I took the photo after the noodles were well mixed by my friend. (Note that there is a Korean version of this as well and is called Jajangmyeon).

Among all the dishes we ordered, this is the BEST one. I recommend this noodle dish to you and we will order this dish again next time we are here for lunch/dinner. One of our friends also ordered this dish separtely as takeout for her son.

This noodle is thinner than the normal Shanghainese noodles. The chef made the noodles a bit spicy and we all liked it. This fried noodle was gone in a second from our table.

Highly recommended dish.

Shanghainese version of fried thick noodles. Taste was not bad and portion was generous.

Singapore style noodles (炒貴刁) is a stir fry of rice noodles in a spicy curry sauce. It usually comprises small slices of chicken, and/or shrimps.

We voted this the second best among all the dishes we ordered. We will order this dish again.

Brother Wu's version of General Tsao Chicken is quite different than those in most of the Chinese restaurants in Ottawa. I can taste the chicken meat and it is not battered. (Note: The ones on the left are two battered shrimps that we put to the plate to save some space for our table.)

This was the Bok Choy stir-fried with Beef slices. Good portion of beef slices!

Their version of green onion pancake was ok. To do it right, the pancake is supposed to be layered. Green onions are spread between each layer with sesame seeds. The chef has skipped this step.

Every time I eat green onion pancake, I remember the one I ate at my sister's house in Toronto. My dad (a Shanghainese) taught my brother-in-law to make the real green onion pancake from scratch (i.e., from making the dough to rolling the dough to pan fry). My brother-in-law made the green onion pancake for every one as a snack (we were doing Karaoke). On the first bite, my big brother almost wanted to hug my brother-in-law for making such a good green onion pancake. My big brother said "I haven't eaten such a good green onion pancake for the last 20 years. It tasted so delicious."

This was the dessert we ordered (豆沙窩餅). My friend ordered this dessert last time and she said the cake was very good and the pastry outside was crispy. The one we got wasn't crispy outside. However, taste was still ok.

Chinese and Japanese like to use red beans to make a variety of desserts. There are red bean icecream, red bean mochi, red bean sweet soup, and different kinds of red bean cakes. Somehow I found my Canadian friends do not like red beans too much. Don't understand it. I like RED BEANS.

Tender and delicious squid stir-fried with peppers. Have you tried this type of dish before? My hubby didn't know we ordered this dish since the squid pieces disappeared from the plate very soon.

The photo shown is Brother Wu's Special Shrimp with Hot & Sour Sauce ($12.95). The size of the shrimps was big (enlarged with the batter). Give it a try when you are here for dinner next time.

Among all the dishes we ordered, their Xiao Long Bao was the worst. Not to talk about the shape and the look, there wasn't any juice coming out on the first bite. My friend said that their xiao long bao tasted like frozen. My friend suspected that they may have pre-made the soup dumplings and steamed them on order. (Forgot to take the photo of this one.)

Their pan-fried pork dumplings are alright in taste. Each one is big with generous amount of pork meat. But since we are good at making dumplings ourselves and our standard is quite high for this dish, their pork dumplings failed our taste and we will not order this again next time. (It is hard to compete with homemade potstickers.)

I taught my friend how to make pork dumplings and now she becomes an expert herself. Her son likes her dumplings so much that she makes about 200 potstickers each time she goes to see her son (of course she freezes the dumplings individually).