Travelling Sushi: Review: Dinner @ Liu Yang Steamed Dishes (浏阳蒸菜), Toronto

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Review: Dinner @ Liu Yang Steamed Dishes (浏阳蒸菜), Toronto

#300 steamed fish head with chili peppers - recommended

Updated 2nd visit

My second visit to Liu Yang is much improved. First, I was able to get a "real" non-chipped tea cup, and I have noticed the addition of pictures depicting the rural China area.

We ordered pretty much the same dishes, with the additional of the 501-Kung Pao Chicken, which is a really quite delicious dish and has plenty of "wok hay" (stir fried in a wok over high heat).

Original visit

Liu Yang Steamed Dishes is yet another new restaurant that has recently sprung up near Yonge & Sheppard. Liu Yang and Sik Korea opened around the same time, on the same street, but offers different types of cuisine. You can read about my review on Sik Korea here.

Liu Yang took over what used to be Pho Spring Garden. They have actually kept all the furniture and decor, and if you look closely sometimes you can even find remnants of Pho Spring Garden (e.g., the windows still has Pho Spring Garden name stuck on it). I think that it is a bit sloppy. It's ok if you decide to keep the existing furniture, but at least remove the old restaurant's name.

At first glance, the menu offers reasonable pricing. Dishes are typically around $7-$9. However, once we placed the initial order, we quickly realized that they are tapa sized. I'm not a big eater by any means, but even for me, I would need at least 2 dishes to fill me up.

Another thing that annoyed me was that they didn't have enough cutlery and dishes in stock. One of our teacups were chipped in 5 different places, and when we asked for a new one the server apologized and told us that they didn't have enough. Waaah? Not enough teacups for a Chinese diner?

The food itself is pretty solid - we ordered a number of different dishes to try. Liu Yang is part of Hunan in China, and the region's food is known for its hot spicy flavour and deep colour. There is a heavy use of chili peppers, garlic and oil, which I find delicious. My husband would disagree, he thought that everything was too oily, so at the end of the day I suppose it comes down to personal taste!

Dishes