A MENU AS BIG AS CHINA
Seafood and a lot more at Bashu
You might expect that coming up on four years doing this job, I would no longer be flummoxed by a restaurant’s menu. And yet, this week at the Bashu Seafood Restaurant, I was bewildered for a good 20 minutes while determining what to order from its lavish catalogue of dishes.
Open since October in a mall at Merivale and Hunt Club roads, Bashu serves a staggering range of Chinese food from Sichuanese to Cantonese to Shanghainese. Bashu’s thick, rubber-bound menu teems with not just the names of dishes in Chinese and occasionally flawed English, but also glossy photos of styled dishes.
It amuses and pleases me that on the familiarity scale, the food at Bashu is at the opposite extreme from what’s served at East Side Mario’s a few paces away.
Here, there are delicacies and banquet fare, from Beijing duck at $48 to steamed abalone with shark’s fin and fish maw at $588. Those who value authenticity might find that they can’t handle the truth at Bashu, which serves duck’s blood, beef and tripe in spicy soup, sea cucumber, griddled bullfrog and all kinds of offal. The mid-day dim sum menu is more than 90 items long, and its greatest hits are available all day. As for the seafood in its name, Bashu has whole fish and crab in tanks at the back of the dining room, which can be killed and prepared in any number of ways if you say the word.
Bashu is a franchise operation, although its sisters in Toronto are called the Bashu Sichuan restaurants. The place is large, as suburban mall restaurants can be, and it strives for opulence, with glitzy modern chandeliers and a bright dining room packed with tables and narrow chairs. Those seeking privacy and more comfort will want one of several rooms along one wall. The canned instrumental music can be loud.
After three visits and much menu perusing, I’ve found a lot of variability among the dishes. If there was a trend, it was that the Sichuanese dishes, generally the spicier items, appealed more. Fans of robust, exotic flavours will find what they want here, although fans of refined dining might not.
Ma po tofu ($11.99), the famously chili oil-drenched dish of soft bean curd and ground beef, was comforting peasant fare that provided the requisite spicy tingle. “Fish flavoured” stewed eggplant ($13.95), so named because the preparation with pickled chilies, garlic and ginger was initially applied to fish before being tried with pork and eggplant, was spicy too, but offset by sweetness.
Diced chicken with chili peppers ($14.99), was appealingly spicy but not overpoweringly so. But we did want a lot more meatiness from the admittedly crisp and well-seasoned chicken bits.
General’s Tao’s chicken ($13.95) suffered from the same problem, to the point that it deserved to be court-martialed. Covered in a sweet, sticky, slightly chili-tinged sauce, the chicken registered much more as batter than bird.
A half-order of tea-smoked duck ($23.95) was a crowdpleaser. Not every chunk was moist, but the best pieces were juicy, rich and decidedly but exotically smoky.
The northern Chinese dish of stir-fried lamb with cumin ($13.99) was ruggedly flavourful, although the slices of lamb struck me as far too slippery and perhaps overly tenderized.
Stir-fried prawns with salted yolk ($16.99) presented the head-on, shell-on seafood, the carapaces flecked with rich bits of cured egg. The dish made for rewarding eating for those willing to get their hands dirty.
Two soups, a “sweet and sour” soup ($8.95 for a small serving) that was punchily hot and sour, and flavourful West Lake soup ($8.95 for a small serving), a clear broth with much ground meat, wisps of egg white and coriander, hit the spot.
During one visit, the steamed rice ($2 for a small but mounded bowlful) was dry.
Dessert options tended toward items (a warm rice pudding in syrup for $6.95, four miniature pumpkin “cakes” for $6.25) with sweetened bean-paste fillings. Mango pudding ($3.95), topped with condensed milk, was so-so.
At a dim sum lunch, dishes ordered from the mammoth menu were quickly dispatched from the kitchen.
At all of my visits, service has been fast, friendly and helpful, although some hailing has been required.
Seafood congee ($5.80) was an impressively flavourful, assertively salted and gingery rice porridge studded with shrimp and fish. Sichuan noodles ($6.80) topped with ground meat packed a nice spicy punch.
Shrimp har gow ($4.50) were just a bit underseasoned but still enjoyable, with fillings marked by chunks of shrimp. Pork-filled Shanghainese soup dumplings were a less impressive, prone to tearing and not as tasty, although they still delivered the needed brothy, fatty pop. Deepfried shrimp balls ($4.50) were grease-free and delicious, but shrimp in rice rolls ($4.50) were overcooked.
And yet for all of these and other dishes eaten, I think I’ve only scratched the surface at Bashu. After all, none of my fellow diners would eat fire-exploded pork kidneys with me, and a tray of chili-smothered Sichuan barbecue whole fish would have overwhelmed my more conservative table.
So, even if the quality of what I sampled at Bashu was uneven, I’m sufficiently pleased and, moreover, still curious enough to want to return. Perhaps the best strategy would be to walk around and see what the many Chinese customers with better knowledge of the food are ordering, and then simply tell a server, “I’ll have what they’re having.”