[CRA 2011] Baked Durian Pastry from Rainflower Restaurant

Unlike last year when we pretty much went around tasting the CRA award winning dishes on our own, this year we decided that we want to go try these dishes with others. One of the reason is because many of the winning dishes these year is expensive. There is very little point bringing our boys to these dinners because all they care about is salted fish fried rice. Yeah, to them crabs are hassle to eat and they prefer fried rice over them.

So we met up with JoyLuckClub and BR. We wanted to meet up to discuss something too and so we suggested to meet in Rainflower Restaurant. Some of you may know that JoyLuckClub is a blogger and she blogs on A Wok in the Tuscan Kitchen.

With a blog name like that, I had initially thought that they were from Italy. It was not. It?s just that the Tuscan reference is of their garden. They must be very proud of their garden. I gotta see what the fuss is some day.

Just a bit of a background (you probably can deduce it from JoyLuckClub?s blog anyway) ? JoyLuckClub is Asian and BR is white. And I was hinted to go easy with BR. LOL! I was thinking ? shoot! I guess I can?t order chicken feet, pig stomach, chicken knee joint, pork knuckles and stuff like that.

I was also thinking ? ?does that mean I should stay away from ordering the award winning Baked DURIAN Pastry?? No way I am not going to order that. LOL!

Suanne and I had never been to the Rainflower Restaurant before. This place intimidates us. We has seen how posh looking it is before and we thought it would be very expensive eating here. So we had never tried it before.

The Rainflower Restaurant is located on No 3 Road and sandwiched between Canadian Tire and Yaohan Center. It is impossible to miss this stand alone building with that bright yellow awning and purplish wall. The restaurant perhaps has the biggest signage of all Chinese restaurants in Richmond.

Parking here is horrendous. You have to be careful here. If you are eating in Rainflower, you need to park in the car park in front of Rainflower. Don?t think that you can just park in Yaohan Center or Canadian Tire and walk over. There are people who will pounce on your car the moment they observe you parking in the wrong place.

I managed to snag a spot at the back of the restaurant. There are some spots at the back which not many people know about. JoyLuckClub is a veteran in this place. They parked in Yaohan Center, walked into the shopping mall and then walk out again. I did not ask if they walk in and out via different entrance. If you want to pull that trick, you must walk in from one side and out the other. The tow truck people have dollar $ign$ in their eyes.

The dining hall is very big, very cavernous. This place used to be Mark Work Wearhouse and later on XS Cargo before they made this into a restaurant. So you can imagine the high ceiling and wide column free dining area.

I like it. It is quite fancy but it is also somewhat dim for a dim sum restaurant. I noticed this because this is one place I had difficulty taking pictures for dim sum.

Despite the site the restaurant is very busy and they managed to fill almost the entire restaurant.

Hehehe ? JoyLuckClub remarked that Suanne and I took a long time going over each and every item. This time we are a bit more careful because of you know who. LOL!

I like their dim sum menu. The page on the left is the steamed dim sum items ? mostly the normal things like dumplings, buns and such. This page is not particularly exciting. The items here are priced from $3.25 to $5.80 and is available from 9:00 AM through 3:00 PM. So it was not as expensive I thought. As a matter of fact, for a setting like this, I thought the prices were very reasonable.

Flipping over the menu (the right image above), this is more exciting. This is where the (more expensive) Chef?s Specials are. The Chef?s Specials are only available from 10:00 AM. The items here are $6.00 to $9.00.

The Rainflower Restaurant won two CRA awards this year. The first award was the Baked Durian Pastry which we located on the menu. The other award winning dish was nowhere to be found. It is the Roasted Lamb Rack with Chinese Wine.

I-must-have-that-dish-too!!!

I asked one of the captains about it and he brought us the menu above. It is obviously not part if their dim sum menu but he told us that we can order this if we want. So we ordered it.

The Baked Durian Pastry (on their menu it is called Durian Roll) looked every bit what I would expect from an award winning dish.  The pastry was … More after the jump. Click to read the rest of [CRA 2011] Baked Durian Pastry from Rainflower Restaurant (724 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2011. |
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Post tags: Cantonese/Southern, Dim Sum, Restaurant Review, Richmond