ottawa foodies

I haven’t been here in a while and have mostly been for dim sum but when our initial choice of Ng’s Cuisine was booked for a private event, we came over here and had a lovely dinner.

We ordered the Special seafood dinner for 2 and added a dish of lobster on noodles. The dinner for two started with a chicken and shark fin soup, silky stir fry shrimps, sliced abalone and shiitake mushroom on baby bok choi and crabmeat on snow pea tips. The lobster was noodles was delish. We shared among the three of us and finished it all. It was delicious.

The shrimp they served us was bad. It smelled like your garbage if you left fish in it for a day. I won't eat there again

Thanks snoopy loopy, you could be right. The server did say the "red grouper" (garoupa??) was good for 2 people, but that they also had "grouper" which was much larger and more expensive.

Since it was not written in English, you may have thought you heard grouper, but what they probably meant was garoupa, a very popular fish used in Chinese cuisine. And yes... if you look up garoupa, you'll see it's just the Portuguese name for grouper, but from experience, they are different.

Apologies for the photo, but the server deboned it before I could snap the pic. Specials last night at sea king included this fish, described as "whole red grouper" but nowhere big enough to be a grouper. Snapper maybe. In any case it was steamed whole, and served on the bone in a scallion and ginger sauce for $17.95. Fresh tasting and very simple but well prepared. Also had a decent chicken dish with hoisin type sauce. Fish was excellent, the rest was good. I'd suggest that you do what we did and ask the server to describe the specials which are written only in kanji on a whiteboard, no english.

Can i offer anyone some foie gras instead?

Shark's fin soup has been a Chinese delicacy since the 1300's... that is all.

To my knowledge, all of the better Chinese restaurants in Ottawa offer Shark Fin Soup. So if you boycott this one, you'd better boycott them all!

I also am repulsed by stories of how shark fins are harvested, but I prefer to boycott the soup itself rather than the whole restaurant. Good food is hard enough to find -- there's no point in artificially limiting my options!

Agreed times a million. There's nothing out there that can justify or excuse eating shark fin soup. Not even close. This isn't a grey area like foie gras. Total and utter boycott.

Agreed. I pass by Sea King on my Merivale shopping trips and checked the menu ages ago to see if they really serve shark fin soup. I was thinking of tying in a lunch/dinner there while in the neighbourhood but knowing this soup is on the menu discourages me from a visit.

This was the Sweet Red Bean Soup with purple rice. A typical dessert in a Chinese restaurant. The chef added purple rice to the sweet red bean soup. We all like it!

Note: Somehow all my Canadian friends do not like this dessert so much.