Curry King

*This is an updated post on the original as of 10/20/09* On my way home today, I dropped by our local IGA and picked up some items intending to cook dinner. However, as the clock ticked down to 6:00pm with Viv nowhere in sight, I knew that it would be dinner impossible. When she finally called at 6:15pm, I made it clear I wasn't going to start cooking since our usual dinner time is at 6:00pm. Therefore, I got the kids ready and bundled everyone into the car. With the kids, generally going to anything exotic is a bad idea since they probably won't eat it. Let me rephrase that, my son won't eat it. Therefore, Greek, Indian and anything Latin was out of the question. We needed to go to something safe... such as a HK-Style Cafe! Ah yes, where you can get Western food that looks and tastes nothing like it's supposed to!

We needed to go to Metrotown, so we went for something nearby - Curry King. With a name like Curry King, you'd think it exclusively served Curry. Wrong. It's a Hong Kong-style restaurant that does serve curry, but also Chinese rice and noodle dishes. In addition, it the aforementioned "Western" food. We were lucky to get parking right in front since there are usually a lack of parking spaces in the area. We were greeted to an extremely colourful dining room, complete with non-trendy colours. On past visits, it has been late night and their mini-meals are around $8 and are a bit smaller than the full size versions. Included with the mini-meals is a choice of drink and soup of the day. Tonight, it was the regular dinner menu.

I've had the curry brisket in the past and it is indeed very good. With a name like Curry King, it'd better be! Although, I much prefer the curry at Mui Garden and Cafe Glouchester. The curry is smooth and only had hints of heat, this is typical of Chinese versions of yellow curry. The brisket is fairly tender, and has an acceptable amount of fat. Tonight, there was no curry; rather, Viv had the 2-item Set Meal dinner which includes a soup, rice or spaghetti, choice of sauce and hot drink. She picked the Rib Eye Steak and Chicken Steak as her 2 meat options. We were not surprised to see the steak overcooked when it arrived since HK-Style cafes rarely get steak right. They either cook it wrong or *gasp* marinated it until it's too salty. The meat was also not really all that tender as well. However, the chicken steak (really a deboned leg and thigh) was juicy and tender. Not much to say about the frozen fries and veggies underneath. only table left. For once, the side spaghetti was not a mush and mixed with the garlic sauce, it was pretty good.

I chose the Salted Fish & Chicken Fried Rice, which is one of my favourites. The rice was pretty firm and there was a good amount of tender chunks of chicken. Despite the salted fish, the rice could've used a bit more seasoning. For the kiddies, we got an Unagi Udon. Okay, don't ask me how this made it onto the Curry King menu; but it was surprisingly good. The udon was still a bit chewy and the soup was quite flavourful, if not a bit peppery. A large piece of tasty unagi rested on top of the noodles. A pretty decent meal at Curry King. Nothing outstanding; yet nothing was horrible - a predictable meal. Service was decent except there was like only one server for the whole place and it got kinda slow when more people came in. Only in a Chinese restaurant you'll find one server covering an entire restaurant!

The Good:
- Good portions
- Food is generally decent
- Reasonable prices

The Bad:
- Parking is hard to find
- Hong Kong style of Western food isn't for everyone
- Service was friendly; but there was only one server???

Curry King
#5 - 4250 Kingsway
Burnaby, B.C.
Tel: 604-437-3638