Ottawa Foodies

When summer is here in Ottawa, it would be difficult to get a table at Chu Shing or Yangtze on the weekend. This is because most of the wedding banquets take place in Ottawa's biggest Chinese restaurants.

So, it is nice to have a good Chinese restaurant in the Kanata area.

The dishes we ordered last night were all consumed by my boys. My young son also asked me the name of the dishes so that he can bring his friends here for dinner and try out Chinese food.

The service here is always excellent! The server is experienced and this makes the difference!

Fortune Express is a gem of a Chinese restaurant, hidden away in the middle of a non-descript strip mall. There is an accessible bathroom, which is works out well for my dad. The food here is very good overall, and it's one of the better places for Dim Sum in Ottawa (the best is the Chu Shing on Somerset Street West). My family and I have been to this restaurant many times. Each time the service has been fantastic (not bad when our table has seated 9 adults, including seniors with a walker and chair, 3 restless toddlers and a gurbling baby). The staff are just as friendly here as they were at the Yangtze.

Just love this place in general for an easy dinner close to home. Many dishes are as good as the best in Montreal's chinatown and the rest are above average because everything is so fresh. Especially try the won ton soup to share (lots of fresh veggies), salt and pepper shrimp, springrolls. General Tao chicken was fairly awful but that was the only miss on this menu.

My friend invited us here for dinner. We had the crab meat and sea foam soup, deep-fried mashed tofu (off the Special menu), steamed fish, sweet and sour pork, and seasonal vegetable stir-fry.

The soup was good. The taste of the food was fine. But I found the menu price more expensive than most of Chinese restaurants in Chinatown.

The chef must have used a lot of MSG. My throat was so irritated that night and had to keep drinking water to relieve that burning feeling.

We've been here a few times for dinner and dim sum, and it's always been nice. We also recognized May and Wing from the Yangtze. On today's visit, we noticed the menus seemed brand new and were almost identical to those at the Yangtze, both in presentation and content.

We reserved a table for eight at 6pm, but they were so busy with eat in and takeout customers that we had to wait 45 minutes for our soup to arrive! They apologized a bunch of times and gave us an order of the dim sum "Baked BBQ Pork Puffs" to keep the kids alive while we waited.

I've covered most of our dishes below, with the exception of our standard off-menu "Fried Noodles with Vegetables" that we order for our kids' sake (they don't like meat). I looked for the Deep Fried Mashed Bean Curd on the menu but didn't find anything remotely like it. Either they've changed the menu, or it's a special off-menu item... anyway, we found lots of other good things to order!

I have been there for dinner many times and have ordered takeout twice. The food was okay if you know what to order. Some of the servers are very experienced. The new ones aren't. So, make sure you ask for the experienced servers (I recognize May and Wing who used to work at Yangtze in Chinatown).

My recommended dishes are: "Deep Fried Mashed Bean Curd (called Pai Pa to fu)", "Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup", "Crispy Deep Fried Chicken", "Szechwan Style Crispy Beef" and "Yang Chow Style Fried Rice".

For the "Deep fried mashed bean curd", I read some review from RestaurantThing and the recommendation is to put the sauce aside for the tofu. I have to second that. Their General Tao chicken was also pretty good and crispy as well.

Note: The price is a bit expensive than Rideau Chinese restaurant at Eagleson. But the ambience at Fortune Express is better.

Took my sister and brother-in-law from Toronto here for Dim Sum. We also ordered the Fried Rice Noodle with Beef in Soya Sauce. The dim-sum and the rice noodle were very tasty. Both my sister and brother-in-law gave good rating to the food.

My sister is a good cook at home (she used to host many parties for 60+ guests at home and every one likes her food). Now that she gets older and doesn't feel like cooking too much at home any more (especially when all their kids have grown up and moved out). So, when they give a good rating of the food, this is a good sign.

Shrimp Shiu Mai.

Here is my favorite dessert - sweet sasame ball.

Sticky rice chicken wrapped by lotus leave. Not recommended. How come no Chinese restaurants in Ottawa will go the extra mile to spend some extra time to prepare the sticy rice by steaming the rice instead of using rice cooker to cook the rice. Sticky rice will taste better by steaming.

Steamed rice noodle roll with shrimp inside. If the dim-sum place does not offer this dish, then it is not dim-sum.

Here is the stuffed egg plant. I don't like egg plant. So, I can't tell the taste. But I am told that they were good.

How can you go to dim-sum without eating the Har Gow (shrimp dumpling)? The tray should have 4 har gows. My husband must have taken one out before I took the picture.

The picture shown is deep fried pork dumpling. Very good. If you like sticky rice, try this one.

Here is the steamed squid. Taste was not bad.

Fortune Express serves dim sum from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM on the weekend only. I tried their dim-sum today and it was good. They have dim-sum carts as well as order from the menu (i.e., you put the check mark on their menu and they will bring the food to your table). I like their baked BBQ pork puff (see picture), sesame ball, deep-fried to-fu. These are my recommended dishes. The Har Gow and steamed rice noodle roll are okay. Not recommended one was the "sticky rice".

For the "Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup", if you don't like crab meat, you can replace it with chicken. The "Chicken meat and Sea Foam Soup" was as good as the "Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup".

We enjoyed a medium Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup (my favourite) and also ordered a small Straw Mushroom and Egg Drop Soup (my kids' favourite). The server was surprised because I guess nobody orders two different soups for one table, but hey we like our soup!

Both were good.

Every Chinese restaurant in Ottawa has "Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup" in the menu. This is our favourite soup.

Just went here for Dim Sum (around 2:30PM). We know that we were late for Dim Sum.

Many of the good Dim Sum items were gone for the day. But the har gau, Steamed rice noodle roll with shrimp, stuff bean curd and deep fried pork dumpling were still available.

We also ordered Fried Rice Noodle with Beef in Soya Sauce. I have tried this before and know that the chef did a good job for this dish. I recommend that you try this one next time. (I remember a Hong Kong chef story movie saying that a good chef must know how to cook Fried Rice Noodle well.)

We didn't order too many dishes. So, the bill came out pretty good price. $45 for 5 people.

Also a good job on their crispy deep-fried chicken! This dish is normally ordered when my boys are having dinner with us. Who say "No" to crispy chicken!

We got a whole fried chicken and totally feasted on it. Very nicely done and highly recommended!

Again, this crispy beef with sesame seeds was excellent! Good portion size. I should say that this dish is one of their chef's trademark dishes. Thumbs-up!

We ordered the "Crispy beef with sesame seeds" dish tonight. If you like sweet and sour and a little bit spicy taste, you will like this dish.

The Szechwan Crispy Beef with Sesame Seeds was excellent, and was the first plate to become empty at our table!

We went to have dinner here again. For 4 of us (2 couples), we ordered our favorite "Crab Meat and Sea Foam Soup" as usual. For the dishes to go with rice, we ordered the following:
- Lobster with Ginger & Green Onions ($21.95)
- B.B.Q. Duck (half only) - $12.45
- Steamed fish with Ginger and Green Onions ($13.95)
- Stir-fried choy sum with shrimps

Overall, the meal was okay. See the comment for each dish below. Next time when I am here to eat, I will stick to the deep-fried Mashed Bean Curd (pei pa tofu) and deep-fried chicken and beef with green onions.

Oh! Service was impeccable (we got May as our server)! She kept filling up our tea pot. Our dinner was relaxing since we carried on our dinner conversation until their closing time. So, this is a bonus point added here!

We always ordered the "Deep Fried Mashed Bean Curd". Tonight, we wanted to try other tofu dish. So, we ordered the "Soy Sauce Tofu puff with shitake on top of Choy Sum". Not bad!

NB. This is an vegetarian dish.

We normally like to order the salted and spicy shrimps. Good dish to go with rice.

The "Shrimp with Seasonal Vegetable" was good -- very succulent shrimp in a gingery sauce with choy sum that was just fine.

Here is the stir-fried Choy Sum with shrimps. For this dish, the quality of Choy Sum is very important. I would recommend to their chef to get the Choy Sum supply from their neighbour, BestPrice Oriental Market. I understand that winter time is not a good season for Choy Sum. But I bought some Choy Sum from BestPrice last Saturday and the quality was pretty good.

The Lobster with Ginger & Green Onions dish ($21.99) is one of Chef's recommended dishes. It was not bad.

Here is the steamed fish with ginger and green onions. The fish was fresh and the texture was smooth. But it is too small for 4 of us.

Note: Steamed fish is a popular dish for Chinese. You dip the fish meat in the soy sauce below the fish.

This is half of the BBQ duck. The outside skin looked very shiny with the right brown color. But the duck meat taste was kind of bland. This could be a signature dish if the kitchen spent some extra time to marinate the duck meat for appropriate amount of time so that the duck would taste better. (My niece's boyfriend works in Toronto's restaurant and he told me that they marinate the whole duck in salty sauce overnight.)