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.