Longx­i­ang Restau­rant, on Dixon St oppo­site the cow­boy (or where the Cow­boy was), came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed to me. The love­ly Miss Fur eats her lunch there on a fre­quent basis (hey stalk­ers, she’s sin­gle!), and my father has told me a cou­ple of times about how he took a cou­ple of vis­it­ing Chi­nese dig­ni­taries for din­ner there and they returned three times dur­ing their vis­it, (hav­ing decid­ed anoth­er Chi­nese restau­rant they went to was rub­bish).

And if real Chi­nese peo­ple from Chi­na like it, it must be good, authen­tic, and tasty, right? I decid­ed to test it out for myself, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly only tried take­aways that suf­fered from long delays before we got to eat them, which is hard­ly a sport­ing chance.

So after the Beck­on VIP night, I grabbed my con­stant restau­rant buddy/sister Karen, as well as the Welling­ton­ista’s Hadyn and the delight­ful Amy and set out to give it a go.

Review after the jump.

The menu is long — not crip­pling­ly so, but enough that it’s easy to select one of each ani­mal with dif­fer­ent kinds of sauce. Col­lab­o­ra­tive order­ing had us get­ting roast duck, Orange Beef, fish fil­lets with spicy sauce and chick­en with gin­ger and spring onions, as well as rice, tea, veg­e­tar­i­an won­tons and spring rolls, two Chi­nese beers and a cran­ber­ry juice.

I can’t say enough good things about the love­ly woman who was serv­ing us. She was friend­ly, help­ful and real­ly gen­uine-seem­ing. Lisa says that she knows her fre­quent cus­tomers’ names, and makes assump­tions about their rela­tion­ships. Bril­liant. I love that in a place.

The atmos­phere was fair­ly stan­dard, pret­ty bland but that’s what you can expect.

So that leaves the food. How was it?

Well, I should prob­a­bly say I have very West­ern tastes when it comes to Chi­nese food. I might avoid order­ing But­ter Chick­en in Indi­an restau­rants, but I do love me some Sweet ‘n’ Sour Pork. There­fore I was very very hap­py with the Orange Beef, which was bat­tered and deep fried, served with a tangy sauce flecked with diced chill­ies, and holy crap, it was good. What appeared on first glance to be cel­lo­phane turned out to be shred­ded deep-fried spinach, and that was very very tasty too.

The fill­ing in the veg­e­tar­i­an won­tons was dis­ap­point­ing- I could­n’t tell if it was egg or tofu, but either way, it was­n’t my most favourite thing ever, but the spring rolls were crispy and yum.

The roast duck was exact­ly as it sounds — a plate of chunks of roast duck with crispy skin, served on canned pineap­ple. One of these days, I’m going to invent a bone­less duck, because I am incred­i­bly lazy. Or per­haps I’ll go back to Bei­jing Restau­rant in New­town for their shred­ded duck pan­cakes. You know, one or the oth­er, whichev­er seems eas­i­est at the time.

Mean­while the fish and the chick­en were quite bland, and suf­fered from too much corn­flour goop sauce, while the rice was mushy and seemed more Japan­ese than Chi­nese.

If I went back, which I prob­a­bly would, based on the awe­some­ness of the beef and the spring rolls, and how we hard­ly even had to turn over the lid of our tea pot to get more hot water (there’s a trick for you!), I would stick to the clas­sic West­ern­ised dish­es and would no doubt be reward­ed for that.

The bill came to $101.50 which was very rea­son­able, giv­en that we could­n’t fin­ish all the food.