Well Fed: Casa Victoria

Since E and I love trying new restaurants, I've added a new component to the blog today: Well Fed. This will be my take on my faves and not-so-fave eateries. Feel free to add your own reviews to mine!

A couple of years ago I introduced E to dim sum, one of my favourite dining experiences. Dim sum is essentially an old Chinese tradition of eating a light meal with tea. I first started enjoying this Chinese midday meal when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My cousin used to take me to Pink Pearl, which is now Pearl Harbourfront, in Toronto. When I was a bit older my good friend, Jenn used to invite me to her family gatherings at the now defunct New World restaurant. I learned most of the dim sum words I know through Jenn.

Once I moved to New York I yearned for dim sum and searched for the best in the city. The closest I came to finding *Toronto-tasty* dim sum was at Golden Unicorn in Manhattan's Chinatown, which quickly became a regular Sunday treat for me and E. We would walk to Chinatown across the Manhattan Bridge, have lunch at Golden Unicorn, and then head over to Tai Pan Bakery to get some bubble tea for our walk back home. We shared our love for dim sum with our friends and all our out of town guests. We haven't had a complaint yet!

Today, Jenn and Bill introduced us to a new dim sum restaurant: Casa Victoria [website is in Chinese, but this link will take you to their address and map]. In their words, this was *fancy, upscale* dim sum. Well, fancy it was! The waitresses were wearing black and white French maid outfits, the tables were immpecably set, the waiters attended to our every need, sometimes before we even called them over!

Jenn teaching Indio the finer points of dim sum

But the best part was the food! Everything was delicious! We had pork ribs in some sort of orgasmic honey-sesame marinade, haam sui gok [I just learned the word for my favourite football-shaped deep-fried meat dumplings], paai gwat [spareribs in black bean sauce], vegetable dumplings, sticky rice, spicy scallop cheong fun, sticky rice, and fried donut-rice noodle rolls. I can't believe how much I ate. I'm still feeling painfully full from lunch...it was worth it!