Ningtu Restaurant

Ningtu Restaurant @ 2130 Kingsway

For Sunday brunch we ate at this restaurant, which in English is only generically named "NINGTU". The English title gives you no sense of the specific nature of the cuisine. Kweepo explains to me that the Chinese subtitle to the right of "NINGTU" on the awning signifies the following: "Signature Dishes of Jiangsu Province and Zhejiang Province". And the name Ningtu is actually a reference to a specific town in Zhejiang Province, Ningbo, so it's specialized within even that region (although after our experience there I have doubts as to how authentic it is). Pretty important information about the specific type of cuisine served at the restaurant. I would have been interested in trying such food, but would never have known without being able to read Chinese.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Long story short, we didn't really like this place. The service was very poor. It took us forever to get the attention of the servers on numerous occasions. And the food was disappointing. We've had better Shanghai-style food elsewhere.

The menu:

So shabby! Look at that, the menu is all burned on one side. We couldn't even read the prices for a bunch of the items.

CASH ONLY (please!)

First we ordered "Sweet rice stuffed with shredded pork". I'd love to tell you the price, but that's one of the many items on the menu where the price is obliterated by the burn. Unbelievable. What's worse is that when I went to pay, the lady didn't give me the receipt to check. Have you ever heard of that in any restaurant?

This is what arrived:

It's basically the same thing as the Shredded Pork Wrapped with Sticky Rice you can get at Long's Noodle House for $3.95, but the one at Long's was better. There was too much rice on this one. Your mouth felt stuffed full of rice without much taste.

Next we ordered "Shanghai style fried thick noodles". It's one of the few prices we can read on the menu. It's $7.95.

This is what came out:

The color was unappetizing, and it turned out to taste pretty bad too. Almost no flavor. It's like they just cooked noodles and cabbage in soy sauce. Kweepo didn't feel that this was a particularly authentic Shanghai dish. Cheap enough but not even worth that much.

Next we ordered "Chicken wonton soup". Again we don't know the price because it was smudged away.

Kweepo wanted this. It's something we've had tons of times before. The wontons were actually pretty good, if a little too big - filled with spinach and chicken. The broth wasn't good. It tasted like Campbell's chicken soup. The broth we had in Beijing wonton soup was really good because it was very light and yet very flavorful. Middling decent but not worth going out of your way to try.

Next was this strange dessert called "Ningtu special rice flour balls". It looked exotic and interesting so we wanted to give it a try.

We kind of regretted it when this was plopped in front of us. The balls are huge and really not that appetizing.

They're filled with bean curd. When you bite into them they're very very sticky and gooey and pasty. The sensation is like having a mouth full of peanut butter. Not particularly pleasant. The taste is OK in a typical subdued Chinese dessert kind of way, but not that great. It's just way too large a portion. If the balls were small and bite sized it would be great.

In short, didn't like it. It felt like we were eating lunch at T&T. That's what the food tasted like. Mass produced fare that you could buy in an Asian grocery store, with very few redeeming features. Perhaps there are other items on the menu that are better, but considering the consistently low quality of each of the dishes we got here, I think it gives us a good idea about the overall quality of the restaurant. We were immediately not very impressed when we walked into the restaurant, and that impression was confirmed when we ate the food. It's a shame, because I would like to visit a restaurant that provides authentic and well prepared fare from these regions. At least I know of a few other Shanghai restaurants, so we have options.