Summer Palace back and focused on authentic Chinese cuisine

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This article was published 04/04/2018 (3063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Summer Palace, a longtime south Winnipeg destination, was closed for renos and has reopened recently with a new owner. The space has been lightened up and there’s a fresh menu offering intriguing, authentic dishes, many from the area around the cities of Shanghai and Nanjing.

Summer Palace is located on a stretch of Pembina Highway that’s sometimes called “the new Chinatown.” It is not quite as picturesque as the old Chinatown, unfortunately, being scattered across spread-out, unlovely suburban strip malls. But this end of town is undeniably home to lots of good Chinese restaurants, snack houses and grocery stores, often packed with hungry students from the nearby University of Manitoba.

Summer Palace’s menu is fairly brief, and a few of the pictured dishes are frustratingly billed as unavailable, at least for the foreseeable future. Nanjing-style wonton soup was listed but sold out on two occasions.

Still, what’s there is often good. A nice Szechuan-style fish soup is mouth-numbingly hot, with loads of chilies, crimson drifts of chili oil and big chunks of fish. (A practical drawback is that it’s available only in a whopping $15.95 portion, with no individual servings on offer.) An unexpected beef soup combines a slightly spicy, almost clear broth with tiny flecks of red pickled beef and wisps of egg white.

Slow-braised pork belly is meltingly tender and wrapped in a sticky, slightly sweet sauce.

One good eggplant dish — with a little pork, the server told us ahead of time — involves strips of eggplant encased in big oval pods of chewy-crisp batter, served up in a thick, garlicky and, again, slightly sweet sauce.

Tasty vermicelli with mixed vegetables features glossy glass noodles in a dark soy-based sauce with loads of cabbage. Fried pumpkin sticks with salted egg are dipped in dough and deep fried, with a slightly sweet finish that’s a bit doughnut-y.

The previous iteration of Summer Palace was geared more to generalized North American tastes (there was, for example, a much-loved ginger beef). The new menu moves toward more authentic Chinese dishes, with rarer items such as chicken gizzards, beef tendon, marinated pig ear and blood curd soup.

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The Portage Eatery (912 Portage Ave., #103) is a small, bright spot that used to be a sushi place and now serves good Chinese food at reasonable prices. Along with standard faves such as egg rolls, chow mein and General Tso’s chicken, the restaurant offers several interesting dishes from the Xinjiang cuisine of China’s northwest region.

With influences from the Muslim cooking of that region, there’s a focus on ingredients such as lamb, potatoes, tomatoes and lots of cumin: flat strips of lamb are fried up with loads of cumin, and vermicelli noodles, slightly crisped, are also finished with cumin. The crisp fried potatoes, basically tasty home fries, are also cumin-y.

Also nice are a yeasty, spongey pancake loaded with green onions and a crisp salad of sweet and sour white radish.

The Eatery also offers bakery goods such as buns, rolls and doughnuts.

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I’m so thrilled The Cheesemongers Fromagerie (839 Corydon Ave.) has finally opened as a bricks-and-mortar shop, partly because I love cheese, but also because I just love saying the word “cheesemongers.” (I’m always reading British food writers who tell me to talk to “my cheesemonger,” and now I have one.)

The prices are premium — and then some — but the choices are impressive in quality and range. There’s an emphasis on Canadian cheeses, along with edgy British cheddars, pungent, dark-veined French blues and ash-coated goat cheese. Selections are properly wrapped, with tasting notes printed on the paper. (My Isle of Mull cheddar was characterized as grassy, with hints of crabapple and toasted bread.)

Service is helpful, ready with tasting samples and pairing advice. Along with artisanal shrubs, bitters and simple syrups for your cocktail cart, there are also posh biscuits, delicate Marcona almonds, plump Turkish apricots, honeys, chutneys, relishes and fresh crusty bread — basically all the nibbly things you need for a really luxe cheese plate.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca