New Fishport Seafood Bistro

Before the recent rise in Covid numbers due to the Omnicron variant, I met up with my foodie fam to have a multiple birthday dinner at New Fishport Seafood Bistro on Marine Drive in South Van.  It was funny how we sang happy birthday 4 times and merely replaced the placard on the cake for each different person.  Yes, we are cheap like that...  Anyways, New Fishport has been around since the pandemic started, but we finally thought it was a good time to check it out (however David had been here already).

Unfortunately, a few of the items we wanted to order were not available.  So being a seafood bistro, we made sure we got at least the Baked Lobster with glutinous rice on lotus leaf.  This was decent with moist and chewy sticky rice underneath a medium-sized lobster.  There was enough starch-thickened consomme sauce to flavour the rice.  As for the lobster, it was fried properly where the meat had a nice bounce while being sweet.

Next, we had the Taiwanese Cauliflower with cured pork belly and Chinese cured sausage.  I actually make this dish at home often and this one was pretty good.  There was decent wok hei where minimal moisture was on the bottom of the plate.  The salty and fattiness from the cured meats did coat the cauliflower adding depth of flavour.  We found the cauliflower retained a crunch while being cooked through.

Yes, it is kind of odd ordering Sweet & Sour Pork at a place that specializes in seafood, but on the other hand, this is a Chinese restaurant, so it is fair game.  Well, this version was more than acceptable with tender nuggets of fairly lean pork.  The coating was thin and crispy while there was just enough sauce clinging onto each piece.  I would've liked to see more tang, but it was still full-flavoured.

A somewhat interesting dish we ordered was the Shrimp Omelette (although it wasn't named like that on the menu).  There was quite a bit of cold-water crunchy shrimp hidden within the fried scrambled eggs. However, the whole dish was rather bland and I found the eggs to be a bit rubbery in parts.  It wasn't that flavourful and I guess it was an okay dish, but I wouldn't order this again.

Back to the meat, we had the Pork Belly with shrimp Sauce.  This looked and ate a lot like the classic Sichuan spicy garlic pork belly dish except without the spice.  Sliced medium-thick, the pork belly was gelatinous and fairly tender.  It was on the chewier side, but only slightly.  Flavourwise, I guess I got some fermented shrimp flavour?  It wasn't that apparent and the dish was rather flat in my opinion.

Lastly, we had waited for the Whole Soy Sauce Chicken until we had nearly finished our dinner.  To be fair, this was made to order, so that is why it took so long.  The wait wasn't necessarily worth it as the colour was a little pale and there wasn't enough flavour penetrating the chicken meat.  On a positive note, the meat was moist and tender, even the white meat.  As you can see, the food was alright at New Fishport, but hardly impressive.  It is possibly due to the fact that some of the seafood dishes we wanted to order were not available.  If they were, maybe our experience would've been better.  I am not ruling out coming back to try more seafood though.

The Good:
- Some interesting items on the menu (although weren't available)
- Fairly good service

The Bad:
- Food was okay, but not memorable