MON NAN VILLAGE - CHINESE FOOD

  MON NAN VILLAGE:

AKA, ONE OF MY MOTHER'S FAVORITES

Their website:  http://www.restaurantmonnan.com/

43 Rue De La Gauchetiere E., Montreal, QC H2Z1J4  
Telephone: 514-866-7123
Price Range:  ~$15-$30 per person including one drink, meal, tax, and tip 

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Ah, Mom. One half of the reason why I can't ever seem to stop eating. Or stop thinking about eating. You see, Mom is a tiny woman - all of 5'2" tall and 120 lbs - but she is an eating MACHINE. She loves to eat, but never gets fat, is never out of shape, and could probably devour the planet, given enough time. Oddly enough, my love of cooking does not come from her - that's from Dad. My Mom, if anything, HATES cooking. No, seriously, she does. She's really, really, REALLY good at cooking, but she hates doing it. She still does it every day, out of habit and tradition, but she's already told me that if ever I win the lottery or otherwise strike it rich, I'd better be hiring her a personal chef very next day. 

I'll see what I can do, Mom :P.

So, anyway, every year around Mother's Day and her birthday, we spend a number of days eating out, or buying awesome takeout to eat at Mom and Dad's. Typically, if we buy something, it would include a little something called wor sue gai - otherwise known as almond boneless chicken - from Mon Nan Village, a Chinese restaurant tucked away in a small corner in Chinatown.  Wor sue gai is a North American Chinese invention, wherein you mix together minced skinless deboned chicken, pork, and shrimp into a huge patty, bread it, deep fry it, and serve it over lettuce topped with Chinese gravy. When we don't buy that take out, we just go to this restaurant (among several). This past weekend, we went to Mon Nan Village for her birthday - wor sue gai next year, I guess!

So, what did we have? Three glorious fried dishes, and a vegetable dish that somehow managed to be pleasant (by my standards, of course). The first to arrive was goo loo pork - sweet and sour battered pork nuggets with peppers and pineapple:

This dish is why my uncle is fat. No, seriously - the man almost can't go a day without eating this dish. Remember children:  Moderation is key!

This was more sweet than sour, and the pork was good and tender in a delectable batter. It was first to arrive, and first to absolutely disappear... 

Next up was deep-fried ghost flower fish (don't look at me, I didn't give it that name - it's called gwai fa yu in Cantonese). 

LOOOOOOVE this fish!

Readers of this blog (if any), know that I LOOOOVE eel. Eel is my number 1 fish meat. Ghost flower fish is my second favorite fish meat. Especially cooked like this - lightly battered in tempura, deep fried till the bones are brittle, and served with a side of sauce that is a subtle mixture of salty, sweet, and tangy flavours (I have NO idea what goes into it. Been alive 30+ years though, so that sauce can't be poisonous, right?). The scent from this dish catches my attention every time!

Salt and pepper shrimp then arrived. 

A vegetarian tried to guilt me once by calling attention to the "sad" eyes of the shrimp. It just made me eat more shrimp instead...

What I like about the salt-and-pepper shrimp here is that the salt and pepper are not overpowering. They're there, but just enough to complement the shrimp flavour. Also, the deep frying is such that the shells become nice and crunchy. I basically just chew my way through an entire shrimp, rather than shelling the it first. I enjoy that mix of tender and crunchy in the same mouthful. Hm. Does that make me barbaric, I wonder?

The final course was stewed Chinese mushrooms on a bed of bok choy braised in broth.

Sigh. Token veggies.

Yeah, not gonna spend too much time on this. It's vegetable, it's palatable, it helps me keep the scurvy away. Full stop...

Well, okay, to be fair:  The mushrooms are well-stewed, and they are chewy but not tough. It's certainly a pleasant enough vehicle to satisfy a portion of my daily vegetable needs (but never doubt that I begrudge having to eat the stuff in the first place.  Grrr....).

That was it. We didn't order dessert, since we were headed elsewhere to get it. And so, the restaurant gave us complementary fortune cookies and orange wedges. 

I sincerely wonder - whose job is it to write the fortunes?

With no real dessert to describe, I will cap off with a little fortune cookie game that I do with my friends whenever I eat at a Chinese restaurant. Add the words, "in bed" to the end of every fortune for hilarious, or at least amusing, results (no, I obviously did NOT play this game with my parents!). Playing the game (mentally and non-verbally - again, parents were in attendance here), my fortune read, "You will soon find great joy...in bed." 

...

All right! End of summer 2013 is lookin' up!

Silliness aside:  Happy birthday, Mom! Love ya! 

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Map of places I've reviewed so far:

 

Mouthwatering Montreal - Mon Nan Village is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.