Harbour Spirit Restaurant – Overpriced For Average Food

Restaurant: Harbour Spirit Restaurant 王朝粵川海鮮酒樓

Cuisine: Cantonese

Area: Richmond

Address: 5580 No. 3 Road

1: Poor 2: OK 3: Good 4: Very good 5: Excellent

Food: 2.5

Service: 2.5

Price: Expensive

For our International Foods class in school, our teacher gave us a Chinese Cuisine Assignment. The assignment was to go to a Chinese restaurant, sample some dishes and write a restaurant review of the place. We decided to go for dim sum. So where did we go for a dim sum restaurant? Of course we went to Richmond! Richmond is THE ULTIMATE place for Chinese restaurants hands down! We would go there every day if it wasn’t for the horrible drivers there…

We were going to go to HML Seafood Restaurant but as we were going there, Grandma spotted Harbor Spirit Restaurant and that they were having a sale for dim sum, 20% off dim sum and free tea! Also they were a new restaurant so my grandma wanted to try it out. The parking was horrible there as always and we thought I was going die when this car was speeding in the parking lot going like 50km/h.

  When we went inside at 12 pm it was packed with people! There were only 4 servers and we were standing at the door awkwardly before some noticed us which took them a few minutes. We were given a table at the back and asked what types of tea we wanted, there were only 3 choices. We choose Green tea.  The tea had absolutely no taste! But it was free so I can’t complain about it. We took a while

to order since Grace and my grandma was discussing about what to order, and Faith was like “I want siu mai, chicken feet and shrimp dumpling!!” But in the end she didn’t get the shrimp dumpling…… So we order at 12:30 (took so long to order!) and now about the food.

The food:

    

First up on the table was the Preserved Dried Meat on Chinese Donut Rice Roll with soy sauce, peanut sauce and sweet flour sauce ($5.28). When this came to our table it was kind of cold. This dish was inessentially just rice roll with Chinese donut and pork floss on top and gei-lan on the side.  The Chinese donut was nice, crunchy and crisp. The rice roll was thin and nice, it came with 3 different sauce instead of the just the usual two.

  

The House Special Seafood Fried Rice ($14.80) was nothing special about it; we felt it was a little overpriced. It was just regular seafood fried rice, we were a little disappointed but there was a good amount of shrimps, scallop and fish. It was a little small for the price and it didn’t fill us up.

   

The Seafood Fried Noodles ($12.80). We found was a little too salty. The noodles had a good amount of shrimp, fish, gei-lan, carrots and mushrooms in it. The shrimps were fresh and the fish was really soft to bite in.  The mushroom, for some reason, had this weird taste to it. Overall we thought this dish was not the worse we ever tasted but not the best either.

  

I (Grace) was quite disappointed with this dish. The Steamed Ribs ($4.68) is usually my favorite in a dim sum restaurant but here instead of sweet potatoes in the bottom there was pumpkin and only 2 small pieces too! The pumpkin and steamed ribs did not go well with each other. The meat was moist and had a lot of meat but it was bland, the pumpkin flavor clashed with the steam rib flavor.

We also had one of my (Faith’s) favorite dish Steamed Chicken Feet In House Sauce ($4.68). The leg had a lot of meat on it and was flavorful. It was soft and steam well. The skin was still intact, which means that it wasn’t over-cooked. In the end it was still a very average dish.

   

Lastly we had the Steamed Shao Mao Dumpling with Shrimp and Meat-Sui Mai ($5.00). It took a long time for this to come (technically at 12:55), this is usually the first thing to arrive. This was our favorite dish of the day; if it wasn’t for this dish I would have been disappointed for the whole day. The Shao Mao had beef, shrimp, mushroom and roe.  This was really expensive, it $1.25 for 1 piece but it was pretty big but one of them looked weird (the bottom left one). When we bite into it, a lot of juice came out! The skin was thin and it was steamed perfectly. There was a perfect balance between the meat and the shrimp.

The food here was too average and mediocre for the prices. Their XL size was just a regular sized dish; it was totally not worth it when you could buy the same dish for a lot cheaper.  Also the service was not that good either. In conclusion we would not come back when there are other good restaurants In Richmond.   And here's a picture of us in the restaurant <3 (for proof for our teacher)

Grace is on the left and Faith is on the right <3