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Chinatown

Towered said:
LOL - last time I went there, my partner had a cockroach in her hot and sour soup, and they still had the nerve to ask us to pay our bill.
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That's unfortunate to hear. Customer service-wise, the mininum they should have done was at least remove the charges on the bill completely.

My experiences there have generally been reasonable. I used to work at Bay and Dundas, and Yueh Tung was a regular take out spot for some of my former colleagues.
 
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Yueh Tung is the the successor of the 'Kwong Chow' restaurant in that same location. Kwong Chow operated from about 1960 or so up until 1995 or so. So, it could be said to have a connection to being the very last of the Chinese restaurants from the old Elizabeth Street Chinatown of the 50s. I wish I had taken some pictures back in the day; it was a cool sleek sophisticated room. I carried an instamatic in the 60s as but never got a picture of the inside.

The long gone restaurant on the second floor of the Hsin Kuang Centre served up (to me) a bamboo dim sum basket some years ago. The har gow tasted like it had been soused with a chemical. A visual check showed several steamed cockroaches at the bottom of the basket. The chemical was the pesticide. Their remedy to me was a new bamboo basket.

In Hong Kong, if you are foolish enough to complain about the bugs in your soup... they will take the soup, skim the bugs off and return it to you. You are better off skimming the bugs yourself. Especially if you order the watercress soups or dishes. One can never wash watercress clean enough.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
A rule of thumb - you can tell just how serious a particular Chinese restaurant is about hygiene by going to the washroom.

AoD
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This. I've been thinking about how one individual like me could light a fire under the Health Department to get a Chinese restaurant washroom cleanup going. Some aren't even ventilated.
 
Mustapha said:
This. I've been thinking about how one individual like me could light a fire under the Health Department to get a Chinese restaurant washroom cleanup going. Some aren't even ventilated.
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Honestly I will be hard-pressed to think of any non-highest end Chinese restaurant where the washroom will pass muster. Toiletries are often missing, fixtures in various states of decay...and the icing on the authenticity cake has got to be crushed ice/icecubes in the urinals in an attempt to mask the stench because apparently air fresheners are unknown.

It's like Chinese restaurants will die with the same washroom they started off with, no matter how much renos they do in the dining area.

re: Watercress - three separate washes tend to do the trick, especially if you run the final batch through running water.

AoD
 
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^Lazy owners and staff will load the urinals up with ice-cubes to not only mask the smell but to clean the urinals. I worked in a few restaurants that did that.

Having worked in the restaurant business for years, some people just don't know how to use a toilet properly and it's disgusting to clean up. Poo and fluids end up on the floor and all over the toilet seat, because some people stand on the seat and squat, which can also cause damage to the toilet.

These instructions should be in every restaurant bathroom in the city.

Way-to-go-Sign-advises-non-westerners-how-to-pooh-588825.jpg
 
Should we be worried about it? Or should we let neighbourhoods organically evolve on their own? Toronto's Chinatown did displace a Jewish community which had gotten wealthier and moved elsewhere, and now the same thing's happening to the Chinese- the majority have gotten wealthy enough to move to the suburbs, while new ethnic groups are coming in.

What will become of Toronto's Chinatown? Activists worry gentrification will erase a unique piece of history
A grassroots group wants Chinatowns across North America preserved. But is change built in to them?
Shanifa Nasser · CBC News · Posted: Jun 05, 2019 5:56 AM ET | Last Updated: 3 hours ago

Lam, a Toronto artist, is part of an initiative called Chinatowns Coast-to-Coast Fight Against Displacement. The coalition of grassroots organizers is pushing back against commercially-driven gentrification that they believe threatens the character of Chinatowns in cities across North America.

Over the past week, the group has organized demonstrations in Chinatowns in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Toronto and other major cities to call attention to the rising price of rent that they say is driving out decades-old family businesses and community spaces, giving way instead to luxury real-estate developments.
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"Community is one thing that we lose when gentrification happens," says Florence Yee, one of the operators of a new Chinatown-based arts-space called TeaBase that helped organized a demonstration in Toronto's Chinatown over the weekend.

"If you replace our local grocery stores and the small mom and pop shops with office buildings, you're replacing the things that make Chinatown Chinatown."
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Spadina Avenue is now the last remaining snapshot of the Chinese community's earliest days in Toronto. And the history isn't confined to the buildings themselves.

"It's thriving, it's busy ... On the weekends, the grandmothers that make their own sticky rice dumplings are selling them on the corner with the vegetables that they grow in their vegetable gardens."
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Chinatown, she says, has always been a place of change. Most notably, there was the SARS outbreak in 2003, when an elderly woman who had travelled to Hong Kong died of the deadly virus in Toronto. Fears about the illness "almost wiped out Chinatown," says Chan.

Then there were plans for a Spadina Expressway that would have run right through the area.

And of course 346 Spadina Avenue wasn't always the site of the beloved Bright Pearl. Before it was sold to a Taiwanese restaurateur in 1971, the building was home to the historic Labour Lyceum, a hub for Jewish textile workers and activism, where in 1937, famed American labour organizer Emma Goldman once spoke.

Even the population of Chinatown has changed over the years: around the time of the Second World War it was largely Cantonese-speakers from Guandong province, then there was the influx from Hong Kong, and later immigrants from China.

Part of what makes Chan optimistic is the growth of younger Chinese-owned businesses in the area, bringing in things like bubble tea shops and dessert cafes.

"So you could see the influence of the newer Chinese immigrants in Chinatown, we have these hand-pulled noodles and the immigrants coming from Taiwan brought us bubble tea," she says.
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But while Lam and Yee are concerned about the effect of gentrification in the area, Tonny Loui, chair of the Chinatown BIA, isn't worried.

"I think gentrification is a good thing because new shops are coming in. And as you know, the population has grown older and at a lot of the earlier businesses, the people are retiring so we need some new ideas and new operators," he says.

Besides, he says, whereas Chinatown might have once been the singular hub for Chinese groceries and community events in Toronto, today there are thriving hubs of Chinese-owned business all over the Greater Toronto Area in places like Markham, Richmond Hill and Scarborough.

Loui admits rent in the area has gone up about 40 per cent in the last three years and the area isn't quite as bustling and busy as it once was in the past. But he says, it's "still a good deal" for the amount of foot traffic businesses in the area see.

And while several of the newer businesses in the area are Chinese-owned, Yee worries their concerns are less about growing the existing relationships and communities in the area, and more about catering to, say, the significant international student body at the nearby University of Toronto.

"Usually more affluent people who come in … are not necessarily interested in the history of this space and the people who are already here, rather instead bringing a different, more affluent student business to Chinatown," she says.
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I am not entirely sure what can be done - the very nature of the Chinese population in the area around Spadina Chinatown is changing. You simply can't depend your business on an aging population that will one day disappear. I am not sure if the pull is strong enough for Hongers who are in the process of downsizing to condos either - I see most of them sticking around the Markham nucleus.

AoD
 
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