Northern Chinese, Golden Loong

Winnipeg is blessed with a vast array of different cuisines and restaurants. For a medium sized city, I continue to be amazed by not only the amount, but quality of the restaurants I have been to. Golden Loong has been on my go-to list for awhile. As one can see, Golden Loong focuses on cuisine from Xi'an, the capital city of Shaanxi province in China. Doing a quick Google search will reveal that Shaanxi lies in close proximity to Szechuan province. Thus, the cuisine relies on the background of chili spices and adds flavour profiles on top to accentuate and accommodate the hot Chinese spice.

Golden Loong lies in a odd part on the south part of Pembina Highway. Coming from north, one might confuse it as a Domo gas station. Persevering through the dimly lit side road reveals Golden Loong.

I am told that the restaurant owners pride themselves on making authentic homemade Shannxi noodle dishes. Like most Northern Chinese provinces, Shaanxi cuisine relies on noodles along with rice as their carbohydrate staples. What makes these noodles unique is that they are often wider, broader and longer than traditional noodles seen in other provinces. The vast menu includes noodle specials, stir fry dishes and various stews in hot chili oil.

Me and my dining companion quickly veered towards the house specials. To start we got the Xi'an Style Cold Noodle. Perfectly cooked broad noodles with cucumber, bean sprouts and tofu mixed in with a spicy sauce. This cold starter was a great way acclimatize yourself to the heat in Shaanxi cuisine.

We ordered a Noodle of Stir Fried Chicken with Spicy Sauce. For this we opted for the thick noodles to add more texture and bite. This dish was marvelous. Adding a hint of sweetness to the spicy base made all the flavours pop. The star was the chewy thick hand-made noodle. Perfectly cooked, it was strong enough to withstand the wok fry process but light enough to soak up all the different tastes.

We finished with a Stewed Pork Burger. A fun dish consisting of a thick "bun" filled with stewed pork shoulder. The pork was tender and well cooked, but the dish overall was one dimensional and lacked the depth of flavours in the other dishes. Perhaps this would have been a great starter dish before the others, as the spices had already numbed our taste buds before this arrived.

Overall, Golden Loong is a neat find in the Winnipeg dining scene. Often lumped in as Chinese food, one can be rewarded if you take the time and effort to discover the intricacies of the numerous and varied subsets of Chinese cuisine.