New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant: Suckling pig and King Crab dinner
New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant is a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver my family and I frequently go to. They are now Michelin recommended and we usually go for more celebration-based dinners (e.g. birthdays) than your casual every day dinner. We came here again with my family and my fiancΓ©’s family to celebrate our 30th birthday.
I feel like Chinese restaurants can be very intimidating to eat at if you are not Chinese. The menus can be very confusing and sometimes have no English or pictures at all. Honestly, the only reason I feel ok ordering at Chinese restaurants is because I go so often with my family that I’ve just memorized the names of dishes I like (I can’t read π ). So hopefully this post will help you out if you are worried about this.
Recommended: Read my review of New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant’s lobster and crab set dinner menu ($168).
Roast suckling pig and King Crab dinner set menu
New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant has a lot of different dinner set menus and they often change or come up with new ones. Most of these set dinner menus are priced for either 4, 6, 8, or 10 people and can range from $150-200 total. If your group has an odd number of people, I recommend choosing the set menu that is closest to your group size, even if it’s above. For example, at this dinner I am reviewing in this post, we had 11 people but we chose the 10 person set meal and there was still food leftover for packing.
I also usually include prices in my review, but this dinner was actually paid for by someone else so I don’t know the amount. The rough estimate here would be around $1000 for 11 adults and 1 child.
First course: Roast suckling pig
The first course is a show stopper – a whole roasted suckling pig! The presentation can be very exciting or terrifying depending on how you feel about animals/pigs, but generally I would say this is a very nice presentation for a roast suckling pig dish.
How do you eat it? They provide thin crepes, cucumbers and a sweet oyster sauce for you to eat it with. It’s very similar to how you would eat peking duck – you will take a piece of meat from the body that they have already chopped up and put it in the crepe with a cucumber and some sauce. Then you just kinda roll it up like a burrito (or whatever is easiest for you) and eat it together.
The skin is very crispy and there’s a nice layer of fat with the meat so it’s not too lean. The bite-sized chunks they prepare is also very convenient.
Recommended: Read my previous review on a roast suckling pig dinner at Kirin in New Westminster.
Second course: Bird’s nest soup with King crab
In the second course, a server comes with a giant bowl of soup that she then divides into smaller bowls at your table.
How do I explain what bird’s nest soup is? Here’s what Google says: Edible bird’s nests are bird nests created by edible-nest swiftlets, Indian swiftlets, and other swiftlets using solidified saliva, which are harvested for human consumption. They are particularly prized in Chinese culture due to their rarity, high protein content and rich flavor.
So yea, it’s basically a soup made with bird saliva which sounds really strange but it’s actually a really nice soup π. It has a thick consistency and a smooth almost jelly-like texture and honestly the taste is just heartwarming to me. Most folks like to add some red vinegar to it, but I like to just drink it as it is.
Third course: King crab legs cooked in garlic
My fiance loves king crab – it is one of his top 3 favourite foods of all time. Our birthdays are in May so it’s not really king crab season anymore, but we ordered it anyways. So as you can see in the photo, the crab legs are smaller/thinner than what it can be if you order king crab during the winter months.
Cooking the legs in garlic sauce is probably the most popular way to eat this dish. They also de-shell most of the legs for you so you can scrub the meat out easily with a small fork.
Fourth course: King crab cooked in salt and pepper
Salt and pepper is probably the second most common way to cook king crab in. Here the crab meat is more in little balls/puffs and they are fried in salt and pepper. So this dish is more crunchy and dry and has a savoury and peppery flavour. If you prefer fried foods, you will probably like this dish quite a bit.
Fifth course: SautΓ©ed diced beef and eggplant
Next come a series of other main dishes and usually you can choose from a master list. What I would recommend is for you to choose a vegetable, chicken, fish and a beef or pork dish to make it a full Chinese feast (they make a big deal about having different types of protein throughout the courses).
This beef and eggplant dish is one of my favourite dishes from New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant. I always order it because it’s so good! The beef is cooked in a black pepper sauce and the eggplants are also coated in this with some crunchy peppers and onions.
Sixth course: Soy sauce chicken
Next we have the classic soy sauce chicken. It is not really served hot but also not served cold, a kinda room temperature feeling which sounds gross but there’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t worry about it being too hot when you try to eat it or anything.
The chicken is mostly based in light/sweet soy sauce with green onions and has a nice sweet flavour. Love the chicken skin on this even though it’s not fried.
Seventh course: Steamed fish
I’m not going to apologize for this photo because maybe you guys don’t know how hard it is to take a photo of every dish before people start digging in. It is literally impossible in big Chinese dinners where everything is on a rotating glass plate and not brought out at the same time. What am I supposed to do? Stop grandpa from scooping some fish if it’s right in front of him π?
Anyways, this is what was left of the fish when it got to me, but it originally was a whole steamed fish in soy sauce with ginger and cilantro or green onions. No idea what kind of fish but it was flaky and smooth!
Eighth course: Vegetables and tofu puffs
Here is our vegetable dish – gai lan, which is essentially a Chinese broccoli. Often cooked also in a garlic sauce and served with some tofu puffs that soaked in the broth underneath.
Ninth course: Crab noodles
The king crab returns! They took one of the head shells and cooked some noodles with it. Usually noodles are eaten at birthday dinners because it symbolizes a long life.
These noodles tasted ok to me, I thought it was a little strange actually because I usually eat King Crab dinners once a year and never seen them make a noodle dish out of it. The noodle sauce is pretty light and not creamy, and had some crunch with the peas and the bean sprouts.
Tenth course: King crab rice
Usually at king crab dinners, they use the head and make a fried rice out of it with Portuguese sauce, but here they made it more like an egg fried rice with tobiko. This makes the fried rice less saucy and creamy and have more of a dry “wok hay” taste.
The rice was pretty good but since it is the last course, most of us are full. Perfect for packing into a container for lunch tomorrow!
Eleventh course: Dessert
The default dessert is red bean soup with some cookies at New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant. But if you can pre-order when you make your reservation, I recommend reserving a baked tapioca pudding. They only make those on pre-orders but it’s a giant dish of tapioca pudding – not too sweet! – with a layer of pastry on top.
Since we were celebrating our birthdays, they let us bring our own cakes and provided us with extra plates as well as the red bean soup. But OMG how cute are these cakes π? The one on the left is for my fiancΓ©, who is into toys like Kaws, and the one on the right is for me who is into Chanel π. Both cakes use buttercream on the outside but on the inside, one is chocolate and one is mango (tiered sponge). The cakes were ordered from Great Day Bakery.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: βοΈβοΈβοΈβοΈ
Like I said, New Mandarin Seafood Restaurant is one of my favourite Chinese restaurants in Vancouver and the consistency in the food and service has been good. Although I must say service is usually better when my parents are around because the servers recognize them now. Oh, and they speak way better Chinese than me.
The King Crab dishes would have been better if it was king crab season and the crab was bigger (more meat), but the roast suckling pig was one of the best I’ve had so far! Really awesome to be able to combine both of these “main dishes” into a combo set dinner so you get to try both.
Everything else is pretty standard – again I highly recommend the beef and eggplant dish. But usually for their dinner set menus, you can choose 3 other dishes to add to your meal to make it a full set so you can choose whatever you want, which is pretty cool. And if you’re not sure what to choose, just ask the server what is popular.
We will likely be back again! It was a great birthday dinner with our families and so easy to just choose a set menu for a table so large.
Sincerely, Loewe
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