Thursday 20 June 2019

Maple Yip Seafood Restaurant

Update: This restaurant has closed. 
June 20, 2019
The whole sticky rice stuffed chicken!

Wintermelon soup
The wintermelon soup was served in the whole wintermelon and you get to eat parts of the wintermelon when you scoop out soup. This is one of those dishes you have to order in advance since it takes a long time to cook the melon and soup. 

Braised fish
Super tender and flavourful fish!

Mar 26, 2019
Steamed sticky rice in chicken
It takes a lot of work to make this perfectly since they cut the chicken open in front of you and you see the sticky rice inside. The chicken wasn't dry at all and the meat had some of the savoury sticky rice flavour. A really delicious dish!

Dec 7, 2018
Shrimp in cream sauce and chicken in tomato sauce on fried rice

Beef Brisket with noodle soup
We didn't get our regular lunch menu items and switched it up today with half-half fried rice with cream sauce and tomato sauce and beef brisket with noodle soup. The food was good (I wasn't really a fan of the tomato sauce unfortunately), but I like our regular items more. 

Oct 7, 2018
Stir fry green beans, sweet and sour pork, Szechuan eggplant and chicken
All of my favourite dishes here!

Beef and kai-lan and ma po tofu
Everything was delicious as usual. :)

February 3, 2013

Tofu with salty fish and chicken
One of my favourite dishes here at Maple Yip; they cook this one so well. Not only does the tofu absorb most of the pungent aroma of the salty fish and dilute it a bit, it's also super soft which adds a nice contrast to the chicken and fish chunks. A must try dish if you're a tofu-lover. 

Moo Goo Beef
Moo Goo (or button mushrooms) stir fried with beef, snow peas and onions is a pretty standard Chinese dish. It's simple and delicious with thin tender beef slices, soft mushrooms, crispy snow peas and sauteed onions. Yum!

Szechuan Eggplant
Usually when you hear "Szechuan", most people think "uh oh - spicy hot". In this case, it's not spicy hot at all, instead it's more flavourful with a mix of spices in the sauce. It has a great blend of fragrant spices with the sweetness of the eggplant and ground pork. Really good and not Szechuan spicy at all!

Pan fried pork chops with spicy salt
If the Szechuan eggplant above wasn't spicy, this dish makes up for that. 
The spicy salt is a combination of a chilli, green onions, five spice powder and pepper salt powder. If you accidentally bite into a chilli, it burns a bit (in my case it's a lot). The pan fried pork chops are really good - crispy on the outside and meaty on the inside and the salt just brings out the flavour. 

Pickled cabbage with squid in black bean sauce
I find this dish really interesting since it has such different flavours and textures: there's the sweetness of the crisp stir-fried red & green peppers and onions, then the salty and sour taste of the pickled cabbage and the chewy and gummy squid. The black bean sauce does tie the dish together, but at the end of the day, I think the thing that makes this dish so good is that it has such a strange combination of everything and somehow it works. (By the way, try it with rice...it's phenomenal)


Eight Treasure Duck
When they served the duck, it was still all in one piece and beautifully presented. The waiter cut up the duck at our table so that we could serve ourselves (as you can tell - this is an after picture). 
It's a braised duck marinated, fried and stuffed with 8 different ingredients. The meat is very tender and so good and the 8 ingredients each added something different to each bite of duck. I saw lotus seeds, egg yolk, sticky rice, red dates, dried scallops and mushrooms, but the other ingredients escaped me. 

February 20, 2012
This is probably my favourite Chinese restaurant in Toronto - they serve amazing Cantonese style food, charge decent prices, and have super fast service.  It's always super busy at lunch and dinner (even on weekdays), so you either have to make a reservation or get there super early or late - but it's definitely worth it.

Fish sauce chicken
Yummy! Not a lot of meat but the meat was still tender and juicy. 

Pork belly braised with pickled vegetables
This is one of my favourite dishes! It's just like what my mom makes - real Cantonese food. I remember watching my mom cook this dish over a span of 2 days to let the pork belly stew to get the ideal tenderness of the meat and soak in the flavour of the pickled vegetables. Maple Yip makes it perfectly! The pork belly was half fat & half meat and totally succulent. They also have the perfect amount of sauce from the meat and pickled vegetables so that you can drench your bowl of rice in sauce - I tried to lick the bowl clean the first time I had this.
Delicious! And it brings back good childhood memories - which is always the best type of food. 

Clams in black bean sauce
There was good flavour in this dish and a little spicy kick in the sauce. I liked the red peppers and onions were a nice touch to mellow out the black bean sauce.

Stir fried lobster on a bed of vermicelli 
I loved that the vermicelli soaked in the lobster flavour (from the lobster). No faking the flavours in Chinese cooking. The lobster was delicious too; no need for garlic butter as it stayed true to the flavour.

Stir fried Green beans with ground pork
My entire family loves this dish and Maple Yip makes one of the best versions of this dish in Toronto & GTA. It's slightly dry (in a good way) with little bits of meat and it works out to make the dish very appetizing. The spice combination in this dish works wonders - I have no idea what they use, but this is usually the first dish cleared out when we eat here.

Braised grouper with tofu and vegetables
This dish had to be ordered a day in advance. This is a HUGE fish considering we only ate the tail! There was also some bok choy, mushrooms, crispy roast pork (siew yuk) and tofu underneath the grouper. And the fish was smooth and buttery - it totally melted in your mouth!

Steamed tofu with ground shrimp in Egg white sauce
In comparison to everything else, this was probably the most bland dish of the night. The egg white sauce probably took away from the shrimp cooked into the tofu and it just wasn't on the same level as everything else. 


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2 comments:

  1. Very nice blog - and you review in great depth. In my blog I tend to be a bit once over lightly - see this one I did on a restaurant called Prohibition http://caroleschatter.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/prohibition-ponsonby.html

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  2. oh this is a very informative post! i actually enjoyed reading seefood restaurant - very well explained too. thanks, this is very useful!

    Beach Seafood

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