Lucky Inn

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Good morning,

Returning from a friend's cottage after the long weekend, I decided to stop at a Chinese takeaway that had been on my radar. The review follows but…

What I wasn’t expecting was a story about members of a traveller community who have been scamming Ontarians from areas around Toronto to Ottawa, offering paving, landscaping and roofing services that never get completed. As with most scams, the elderly are the most common targets. Be vigilant.

The things you learn by just going about doing restaurant reviews.

Ralf Joneikies, food and drink editor. [email protected]

CHINESE

In luck at the Lucky Inn

You drive by a place like Lucky Inn, and you’re reminded of Chinese-Canadian restaurants just like it from one end of Canada to the other. A partially renovated house with signage that often has a font meant to evoke the region.

As a kid, I enjoyed visiting the local Chinese take-away, and my parents discovered that it was a cost-effective way to feed the family as it provided plenty of leftovers. However, I found that the chicken balls were always best when consumed right away.

This hybrid cuisine grew out of both Chinese tradition and what was available in season in the new country. 

Nowadays, the immigrant influence on how we eat is radically different from even 20 years ago and diners have more sophisticated palates. As a result many seek out more “authentic” expressions of various cuisines and you’d think that Chinese takeaways would be folding due to changing demands. 

Yet, I can’t reach that conclusion because two things remain true: there’s a nostalgia factor and many of these eateries offer large portions for the money, so you still end up with leftovers, and nowadays that’s an important consideration.

Once in a blue moon, you also stumble upon a takeaway that makes more of an effort, relying less on frozen food service products and making things from scratch.

Such as the pork dumplings in the wonton soup. They were light in both texture and flavour and they bobbed about in a tasty but delicate chicken broth laced with napa cabbage and scallions.

In Ottawa-Gatineau, you can make a sport of tracking down the best open-ended egg rolls, invariably comparing them to the standard-bearer Golden Palace rolls. 

While a little smaller, the Lucky Inn rolls can easily hold their own against the legend. They were properly filled, moist and still steaming with the first bite.

I can also strongly recommend the pork spring roll, which is a longer and thinner affair reminiscent of a panatella cigar. The seasoning is different and reminded me of a Vietnamese roll. It was delicious and notable also was the fact that the oil used for frying tasted very clean.

One of my childhood Golden Palace favourites was the almond guy ding. This is a true Chinese-Canadian masterwork involving velvetized chicken, whole blanched almonds and tons of green celery all enrobed in a clear sauce thickened with corn starch. 

At Lucky Inn, I ordered the next best thing: chicken chop suey. I honestly can’t remember when I last ordered this dish but it hit all the right notes and satisfied this rare craving. 

The bean sprouts still had a little crunch to them and the chicken was moist and tender.  It was better than I had expected and I found that, in general, the base ingredients in all the dishes were fresh and flavourful.

I also liked that the vegetables had a uniform chop to them. Thinly sliced bell peppers, julienned carrots, not rough irregularly cut roughage here, just the work of an experienced cook.

I’m not generally enthusiastic about bell peppers as they are often of the mottled sort with a splotch of red or orange against a variegated green background. It’s the grade of pepper that is always the cheapest at food distribution terminals and they’re terrible.

In my Imperial pork, they were impossible to ignore, but at least they were entirely green. They were also thinly sliced so that they softened easily and were easy to consume.

The pork appeared to be an in-house-made char siu (BBQ pork) and was further cooked in a savoury sauce that had wilted the veggies. The sauce was distinct with a little heat and consisted of sweet bean paste, sesame oil, chili pepper, ginger, garlic, soy etc. All this to say that it tasted like it had been assembled from separate elements and not ladled out of just one jar.

I thought I’d test my luck with the Singapore noodles and that’s twice in a row fortune smiled on me with a very good version. Just weeks ago, it was Hong Kong Chinese Food on Hunt Club and now here on a river road stretch in Gatineau.

As with the other dishes, all ingredients were fresh and so well-cooked that nothing was overdone. The piquant curry powder was fruity and bright and the noodles were well stocked with pork, chicken and sweet shrimp.

This is a family-run business with mom and pop in the kitchen and son Ken working the counter. Lucky Inn has proper standards backed by decades of experience in the kitchen, and their portions are very generous for the money. 

If you find yourself out that way, this is takeaway worth exploring.

Other Chinese reviews

• Bambu is a safe spot for those looking to explore Asian food

• Sammi & Soupe Dumpling nails soup dumpings

• Much ado about Mr. Maocai

• True flavours of Northern China at Harbin Chinese Restaurant

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FROM THE ARCHIVE

Fiery Chinese cuisine where you least expect it

Originally published September 23, 2023

If you find yourself in an industrial/business park, it’s often for a hard-to-find auto part, new kitchen fixtures or even something (formerly) illicit. Little do you expect to have your taste buds rattled with a terrific lunch. Yet here I was at Noodle’s Invitation, ready to challenge my spice tolerance.

At first I was at the wrong end of Colonnade Road not realizing there was both a north and south end and once I’d arrived I still wasn’t certain that this would be anything more than a takeaway.

Inside the space is small and modest with most who came through the door, simply picking up their orders. If you choose to stay they have seating for about 12.

You have 18 noodle options and they come either with or without broth. Plenty of Sichuan peppercorn and chili is used in the cooking but you are given spice level choices. I found the medium to be just right giving me a slight perspiration while keeping taste buds intact.

Broths are made from beef and chicken and while pork is a common topping, I’m informed they have a larger Muslim customer base so those toppings can be left aside.

I’ve had more than my fair share of Asian noodle soups but the addition of yellow peas was a new surprise. I said as much and was told that yellow peas are in fact quite traditional. The broth was hearty with beef flavour with endless layers of seasoning, minced pork and vegetables. The peas had been cooked from a dry state so that the long cooking time caused the peas to release their sweet and nutty starch almost fully, mingling so nicely with the spicy soup.

There was also an added level of something comforting as I enjoyed the peas together with the noodles. A little like the effect you get when combining rice and beans in Caribbean cooking.

The menu proudly proclaimed that green beans grown in the owner's garden were a feature, so it was hard to resist the next noodle dish.

The pork belly tasted as if it had been cured in a five-spice mixture after which it had been grilled. It really was a perfect top note to a meal rich in textures of freshly chopped cilantro, toasted peanuts and scallions. The wider green beans (commonly grown throughout Europe) were tender and unctuous in the sweet and savoury sauce and in short order you found yourself slurping them.

As a takeaway I opted for the Yibing Flamed Noodle or Flaming Noodles of Yibin as I've seen on other menus. This is another dry noodle recipe popular in Sichuan province. It was loaded with a variety of spicy peppers and while good, I felt that the cook missed adding salt or soy. It had a dusty spicy character but that was about all. Gone was any trace of umami.

One final observation and it had to do with the noodles themselves: they were just a little too flabby for my palate. While they do have one house-made noodle dish, the noodles widely used here were of the commercial variety and were very soft offering no spring when biting into them.

I do enjoy this style of home cooking and being able to adjust the spice level is a useful bonus. It allows even the more timid diner to enjoy a cuisine that may be both new and less intimidating than it appears.

If you like this style of Chinese cuisine, Noodles Invitation is worth the trek.

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