Say yes to Ye’s

Opinion

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This article was published 02/04/2015 (3836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s is an enormous hangar of a place with a soaring ceiling, soft lighting, well-spaced tables and some colourful murals that remind me of an abstract dreamscape. Surprisingly, it’s not noisy and, despite the vast, sprawling space and dizzying array of Pan-Asian dishes (two visits barely made a dent in them), Ye’s even manages to seem cosy.

On Friday, Saturday and holidays the dinner buffet is $24.99, Sunday to Monday it’s $22.99; lunch is $13.99 Monday to Friday, $16.99 weekends and holidays. Seniors get 20 per cent off, and it’s a mere $1.99 for toddlers four and under. Inevitably some items will be better than others, but much of it is surprisingly good — especially the seafood on the dinner buffet.

Make the right choices and you could get more than your money’s worth. Binge, for instance, on silken slices of smoked salmon, on the salmon or red snapper sashimi, and on the barbecued salmon (not on the fishy-flavoured teriyaki salmon, though).

Load up on the plump, flavourful and slightly spicy fried-in-their-shells shrimp. Tempura shrimp were passable, but the cold and tasteless plain shrimp — which might simply have been dumped from a freezer bag onto the melting ice cubes — aren’t worth the calories.

Also to be avoided are the mussels and oysters, both baked in a creamy sort of cheesy sauce that was better than the mollusks it covered. The oysters, in particular, were tiny almost to the point of invisibility. Breaded fried mussels were unpleasantly fishy.

But you’ll also do very well with some of the meats. Barbecued duck and crispy chicken were excellent, and, although not as firm as just-cooked ribs, the barbecued long ribs (rare in Chinese restaurants) were tender, juicy and flavourful.

Most of the above dishes were for dinner only, but a host of others are available at both meals. Of course, when it comes to buffets, there’s always a caveat, and some dishes that are good on one visit may disappoint on another — to wit, steamed basa that tasted sweet and moist at dinner was unpleasantly mushy at lunch.

I didn’t try any of the noodle or rice dishes because those I saw didn’t look appealing, but the dishes I did try were tasty, lightly sauced and not cloyingly sweet, or too salty or gluey with starch (but don’t expect them to be more than lukewarm). Best among them were slices of lemongrass or sesame chicken, skewers of marinated chicken, chunks of mildly spiced Thai chicken curry, tender teriyaki beef and (don’t miss these) terrific fried green beans.

The sushi were unexceptional, but the fish in all tasted fresh (skimpier, it seemed, at lunch than at dinner). I liked the avocado and slightly crisped salmon roll, the spicy shredded salmon maki and the crusty rice pizza with salmon. The rice at dinner was moist and tasty, if a tad too sweet; at lunch it was dry and flavourless.

Although most dim sum skins were thick and often tough, the pork and chicken fillings were flavourful and juicy — at their best if you pop them into your mouth immediately, before returning to your table. Steamed hat-shaped buns were particularly good, and there were even mantou steamed buns (rare, and an acquired taste, possibly, but I love them). And don’t miss the sesame-sprinkled dough balls filled with sweet bean paste and the egg tarts — plain, or with pineapple.

The shredded seaweed salad is another must. The green mango salad was great at dinner, limp and too citrusy at lunch, but worth a try. Skip the salads with mayonnaise, though, since that’s all they taste of.

There are refreshing fruits and a huge variety of ordinary cakes and pastries, as well as ice cream, both soft and hard — the hard cappuccino ice cream with crunchy little slivers of chocolate was particularly good.

The difference in service was like from night to day. Literally. At a Saturday dinner, a bevy of attentive, smiling servers were always at hand, refilling water glasses and removing plates as soon as we’d finished with them. At a weekday lunch, the opposite was true — still very pleasant, but very few of them, and those few elusive.

Lunch is from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., dinner from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Sunday to Thursday, to 10 p.m. weekends and holidays, but get there well before the official opening times, by which time the place will be packed.

 

marion.warhaft@freepress.mb.ca