Posted by Corey Mintz in asian, restaurant review on July 21, 2007 at 7:29 am

Swatow
309 Spadina Avenue
416-977-0601
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and Budweiser, $40.

So I’m having a soak with a couple of my jackass friends. Gideon says, “I’m hungry, who wants to go for Chinese?” If it were my home I would just make dinner because I keep food in my fridge. But the only thing offered to me is stale matzo so of course I wanna go for Chinese. Now Steve refuses to go to Swatow. In fact he goes on a tirade about how he’ll go anywhere but Swatow. And over the week several other people join in the chorus of disdain. It turns out just about everyone hates Swatow. So now I’ve got to go. Admittedly, spite is not a good reason for going to a restaurant. But it’s a potent motivator. My grandmother Flo is gonna live another thirty years on spite alone.

Where to start on a 100-plus item menu? A server drops teacups and spoons on top of the menu as I’m reading it. Hot and sour soup ($3.95 for a small) seems like a litmus test for any late night Chinese. Swatow’s is more candy sweet than hot. It’s also orange and the cubes of tofu are pink. (Not making this up, see photo). I don’t mean to be crass but this gelatinous sludge is the worst hot and sour soup I’ve ever tasted. On Toronto Life’s suggestion we dig in to the char cheung lo mein noodles ($5.95). It’s bad. I mean, food court bad. An attempt at snatching a mouth full of noodles yields an entire plate of noodles glommed together. Fingers are needed to pry a portion from the sticky nest. A stop sign-red goo that tastes like equal parts sugar, corn starch, and red dye #5 is studded with tiny scraps of brownish protein that long ago ceased to be called meat. After a few bites the farce is over and we can’t convince ourselves to take another bite.

A sizzling “Ja Ja” chicken in hot pot ($8.95) comes garnished with a paper napkin. Maybe it’s to stop the sizzling action from spraying grease all over the fine linen or our Saturday midnight best. Maybe it’s some molecular gastronomy type shit and the napkin is supposed to be infused with the flavour of the dish. The meat we pry off of bone and cartilage is soft, gingery, and quite good. But either the table next to us got our meat or the chicken that went into our dish dishonoured his yakuza boss because we were gnawing on knuckles like Curly Howard gaping at a buxom secretary.

But I believe in commitment to a bit. Over the course of this week I’ve eaten at Swatow three times and I can’t say it’s gotten better. By the third time the waiters are doing a double take when I sit down as in, ”Why is this guy coming back?” Am I elitist for not trying the Budweiser?

Some, like a health inspector, may frown on dumplings being assembled at a table in the dining room. But that doesn’t stop me from ordering a batch ($5.95). They’re crispy, fresh, and taste like absolutely nothing but black pepper, though stuffed with a genuine meat-like substance. The nameless flesh may have been pulled from the bones in a stockpot, their flavour donated to someone else’s dish. A pool of soy and fryer grease collects in the serving dish, reflecting the surface of a ceiling we’re afraid to look up at. The strange thing, and this may be evidence of my snobbery, is that everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. On Saturday all the round tables are filled. Everyone’s smiling, dipping chopsticks into communal plates, wiping sauce off their chins and giggling. Is midnight early enough for everyone to be too drunk to care about the food?

I do my own double take when the bean curd eggplant with garlic sauce in hot pot ($9.50) arrives. The Ultra-garlicky Japanese eggplant with fried tofu seems to have been made in another restaurant. It’s dripping with a not-too-syrupy black bean sauce. The eggplant is soft but still retains its purple skin (let it sit for a while and it’ll go grey). The simple flavour of the fruit permeates the whole dish carried by heavy tones of chili and ginger. We decide to go out on a high note and not try the “four kinds ball soup”. A fortune cookie arrives empty.

My Chinese friend from Markham looks down his nose at Toronto’s Chinatown. But there’s a charm to the soot and cigarette peppered streets. As I wait for take-out one night the cook steps onto the sidewalk and has a smoke next to me with zero self-consciousness. I remember not too long ago when these rooms were full late at night with people holding cigarettes and chopsticks in the same hands. Details like that may be thankfully expunged but it’s hard to believe it’s the 21st century when I see the Yoda-aged ladies sitting cross legged on the Spadina avenue concrete hawking a handful of basil or leeks. What I’ve learned is that many of these restaurants have changed hands multiple times over the past few generations without changing the menus. But each one contains at least one hidden treasure like Swatow’s eggplant dish or the Szechuan chicken at Lee Garden or the roast pork at the unfortunately named Kom Jug Yeun. The price of eating at Swatow three times to excavate the menu’s gems is not worth it. Word of mouth is a much more efficient divining rod.