| Searching for the Pavilion Restaurant (246 Hawkstone Drive N.W.; phone 208-3063) in Hawkwood may have you dubiously scanning the housing horizon for some sign of anything other than a single-family detached. But then you spot a Husky Station. And attached to the Husky Station, the Pavilion.
It’s not the most auspicious location, but considering great Chinese food can be found anywhere from posh hotels to prairie diners, it shouldn’t put you off. The Pavilion does a brisk business – most of the tables in the 60-odd-seat room are large round ones for eight to 10 people. There are only a couple of tables for two, so pairs should either go early or join in the steady take-out line.
We decided to do a "base line" comparison with other Chinese restaurants by ordering a list of Calgary standards: ginger beef, fried rice, garlic veggies, fried noodles and onion cakes. It’s not all that the Peking style restaurant offers, but given the length of the menu it seemed a reasonable starting point.
The stuffed onion pancakes ($3.25) from the appetizer list appealed to us. The two doughnut-sized rounds of pastry are sparingly filled with sprightly bits of green onion. The cakes show no signs of having been near a freezer and come to the table sizzling. The pungency and sharp saltiness of the onion are delicious combined with the warm, flaky pastry, but this is not a light dish. Smaller appetites and those disinclined to share may want to make a meal of the cakes with a bowl of soup.
The plate of ginger-fried shredded beef ($8.50) holds a gingery-sweet soy sauce on the bottom, flecked with red pepper flakes. The battered beef is piled in a cone atop the sauce. The beef is crunchy fried, then the sauce is poured over it, so some pieces get a full soaking and some remain untouched, making for a perfect dish to pick away at. None of the pieces gets soggy – a bonus – and the sauce is neither too sweet, salty or hot. The ginger flavour is just right: not too strong, not too mild. A characteristic of the dishes at Pavilion seems to be purity: there are no fillers here, no ingredients thrown in just to bulk up a dish or fill up a platter more cheaply. The flavours are clear. There are no tricks to fool the eye, and nothing extraneous to get in the way of the nose, either.
For example, when the four kinds of veggies in garlic sauce ($8.50) arrived, the perfume nearly drove us crazy. We dove in. The surprise is in the creamy garlic sauce. Although flecked with finely chopped garlic, it complements the flavour of the veggies instead of overpowering them as you might expect. The veggies all have a roundness to them that’s pleasing to the eye as well as the tongue. Succulent broccoli florets hold the sauce for a burst of flavour. Baby corn provides some crunch. Whole white mushrooms slip around in the sauce and then on your tongue. My friend was bowled over by the sweet, tender-crisp punch of the plump sugar snap peas – lots of restaurants choose to use the flatter snow peas for such a dish, but the flavour is rarely as sweet. This was a very good dish.
The special fried rice ($6.95) is a heaping platter with bits of chicken, barbecued pork, green onion, shredded carrot, omelette and a few shrimp. Most importantly, the rice has the smoky flavour almost exclusively developed by a high-heated restaurant wok. The whole point of ordering fried rice at a restaurant is that this elusive smoky flavour can’t be reproduced at home. The only thing that could have made the rice any better would have been if it had been made with day-old rice instead of fresh: fresh rice puts the cook at a disadvantage because it still contains too much moisture to get the texture bang on. A dish of fried noodles with pork and pickled cabbage ($7.50) finished our meal. Shanghai-style noodles full of that same smoky wok flavour and dressed with juicy strips of pork, onion and sliced pickled cabbage is best on an empty stomach, but we perservered. OK, honestly, we dug in and enjoyed. The only thing that could improve it would be a spoonful of hot pepper paste (which we added to our leftovers the next day).
We're planning on another suburban excursion to the Pavilion – it may be a little remote (unless you live in Hawkwood), but the promise of these basic dishes bears out return trips to try more of its cooking. |
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