Restaurant #78 - Chan's House - March 1st 2013

We went to eat at Chan's House. It's a Chinese buffet in Dieppe. The one thing that I found cool about this place is that you can do take-out with the buffet. They give you one of those styrofoam boxes and you fill it up, they weigh it, and you get your Chinese take out. The disadvantage of this is than when you're trying to navigate the buffet, you have all these extra people that are trying to fill up their trays. The other negative was that the floor was wet/slippy and I almost fell a few times, and almost ended up doing the splits once.

On to the food. To me, the food was just ok. I didn't enjoy it that much, I found that a lot of the vegetable dishes were just mushy, greasy vegetables, so I didn't enjoy those. The egg rolls were good (I think that everyone agreed on that, but they aren't the best. If memory serves, Stephan gave them a solid 7.5 on 10). For the chicken balls, it started off well, Darren had good balls with lots of meat. Which led us to come up with the Novinscak Index for chicken balls. It's calculated as the ratio of chicken/chicken+batter, so the higher the number is the better. We were willing to give it a quite high ratio, but as we all had more chicken balls, the ratio went down drastically. (I took a picture of a bad ball, there's a molecule of chicken in the center of all that batter).

Now, on to the good stuff, Stephan's favorite item on the menu was the Mushrooms and Beef (however, he did mention that there was little beef in the mix, but it didn't stop him from enjoying them). Darren also like the chow mein (I think it was this one) and it actually was pretty good. I liked the pork balls, the Novinscak Index was quite high, but mostly because there was no batter on the balls. I'm not sure what Stephane's favorite was, but I do remember him getting a plate of mussels, and I think he even went back for more, so they must have been good.

As for desserts, they were ok. What I didn't like was that I didn't see the names of the items, so I wasn't too sure what I was getting. I did get a piece of chocolate pie, a ginger molasses cookie and some ice cream. The ice cream was good because it wasn't hard as a rock, but it was in getting the ice cream that I slipped an almost did the splits. Stephane got an interesting ice cream that we couldn't tell the flavor in the beginning, but Darren ended up identifying it as Butter Rum.

All in all, in my opinion, this place was ok, not my favorite buffet, but not the worst either, so it should get something like 5 thumbs up.

 

 

The offending "chicken ball"