Jade Yi’s Kitchen should be your Kanata Chinese food staple

• Name + address: Jade Yi’s Kitchen, 5104 Kanata Ave.

• Diet: meat, seafood, vegetarian

• Appetizers: $3.50-$10

• Mains:$17-$30

• Wheelchair accessibility: Yes

• Licensed: No

• Website:www.jadyiskitchen.ca

Having lived in cities with high concentrations of Chinese restaurants, I’m always interested in learning what’s new in our own backyard and I recently found Jade Yi’s Kitchen. 

It turns out that it’s been around for a number of years but is relatively new at its current location in a Kanata mall where you’ll find Windbell Sushi and the second Kowloon Market shop. It was also a very pleasant surprise with a level of cookery that was better than just average.

The weather was a little crisp outside and so I began with a hot and sour soup. It’s something I’ve largely stopped ordering as it tends to underwhelm in our Chinese restaurants but, optically, the Jade Yi version did appeal.

It was a healthy portion that had not been thickened too aggressively with corn starch and was loaded with the requisite bamboo shoots, black fungus, silken tofu and egg.

It had a good amount of shrimp and velvetized chicken, but the sour element was a little absent and I needed to add my own black vinegar to the leftover portion at home. All in all it was a soup for those trying it for the first time: decent but not memorable.

Much better were the deep-fried shrimp balls that followed. Naturally crisp on the exterior this was well-prepared shrimp; soft and sweet and delicately seasoned. They were as good as I’ve had anywhere.

The same could be said of the siu mai. Roughly chopped pork was both juicy and tender, and I recalled a recent Ottawa experience where the dim sum was brought in by a food service company at a greatly inflated price. A reminder to always ask if your food is made from scratch in their kitchen.

As good as those items were, the supple lusciousness of the shrimp-stuffed eggplant was guaranteed to be cemented in memory. The sauce was deep with peppery goodness and garlic and the shrimp paste popped with each bite resolving into the creamy eggplant. Well done.

There’s a certain charm to the contrasting textures found in crispy chow mein noodles covered in satay-sauced beef and vegetables. Some absorb that sauce while others remain firm with crunch, but then you get that sweet onion and tender beef elevating each mouthful. So much so that you forget how full you’ve gotten because you just want more of that sensation. 

These noodles were that good and were just as appealing reheated as leftovers. 

I was expecting a fairly run-of-the-mill experience but instead, I was served food that came out of a kitchen with a chef who had long-time experience cooking such food. Textures, balance of flavours, tenderizing of meats and dim sum recipes were all much better than I’d expected and it’s a restaurant to which I’ll return when I’m out shopping in Kanata.