Nguyen Huong

Short and sweet this post will be.  A friend of mine said Nguyen Huong is the best bahn mi sandwich shop in the GTA.  When someone tells me that a place is the best, I'm compelled to visit.  What makes this place interesting is that rumour (I haven't confirmed what my friend told me) is that the owners of Nguyen Huong are the parents of the Bahn Mi Boys!  The sandwiches are are great!  Simple and delicious.  We ordered a chicken and a pork bahn mi.  The meat had great flavour, put in a crunchy on the outside and super soft on the inside bun and topped with pickled carrots, radish and cilantro.  It's no frills and at the price of these sandwiches, you can probably buy 3 of the ones from Nguyen Huong versus 1 from Bahn Mi Boys.

Bahn Mi

Nguyen Huong
5661 Steeles Ave,
Toronto, ON
M1V 5P6

416-292-8875

http://www.nguyenhuong.ca

The Ace

I love watching the Food Network, especially Diners Drive Ins and Dives.  Whenever I plan a trip, I always see where Guy Fieri has gone, and try to fit in a restaurant or two that was on the show.  So when a local restaurant makes it onto the show, makes me want to go that much more.  I recently watched an old re-run in which The Ace was being featured. The Ace has been on my go to list for a while now since they were also featured on BlogTO's top 50 brunch restaurants in TO.  We popped in for brunch after a run in High Park.

I was really looking forward to brunch, partly because I was really hungry and the other part being that it's on the top 50 list!  Must be pretty good right.  Sad to say, but I was very disappointed.  Our table ordered Huevos Rancheros, a Breakfast Hash Special and The Ace Breakfast.  The Ace Breakfast was nothing special.  Nothing stood out about this dish.  The bacon wasn't particularly good, neither was the sausage.  The eggs were ok I guess.

The Ace Breakfast

The Breakfast Hash Special, I can't remember the actual name of the dish, but it was named 'something' hash.  Friend said it was bland.  Not much flavour.  The hash had some sort of meat, a whole bunch of cooked cabbage, topped off with an over easy egg.  

Breakfast Hash Special

My huevos I think could be considered the worst I've eaten.  The eggs were undercooked.  I'm sure you can see the super runny whites in the picture.  There was very little guacamole and salsa.  More would have been better.  On the menu it's advertised as corn tortillas, but I don't think it was made fully with corn flour.  I think theres a mix of corn and regular flour.  The texture was off from the stuff I eat at Kensington Market.  The absolute worst part of the dish was the fact that they tried to reheat the tortillas on a gas grill where there was to much flame.  In the picture I don't think you can see, but when I flipped over the tortilla, you can see the black gas 'fumes'.  I hate to leave food on my plate, and I hate to send food back, so i ate the stuff on top and left most of the tortilla on the plate.

Huevos Rancheros

So don't always believe what you read, or watch on TV.  You can get disappointed this way.

The Ace

231A Roncesvalles Ave, 

Toronto, ON

M6R 2L6

416-792-9972

Hours: Dinner Every Night 5pm - 11pm

            Lunch Weekdays 12pm - 3pm

            Brunch Saturday Sunday 930am - 3pm

http://www.theacetoronto.com

Tohenboku Ramen

The first place in which I ate a version of ramen that did not include pork or pork based broth of any sort was in Vancouver at Marutama Ramen.  I haven't gotten a chance to blog about my trip which happened last year, because of the sheer number of places I ate it, it would take a super long time time write up a single blog about it.  I promise it's coming.  It will be done before the summer ends.

I was really looking forward to some chicken based broth ramen because it was very good at Marutama.  It can't be that hard right?  I make chicken broth at home all the time.  I do cheat out of convenience sometimes, but it never tastes as good as the homemade stuff.  I ordered the shio original Tohenboku ramen.  The husband ordered garlicky Tohenboku ramen.  They had a special at the time, not sure if it's offered now, that if you follow them on twitter, you can get a free topping on your ramen.  So the husband got an order of pork belly added to his ramen.  We also got an order of karaage to share.

My husband loves karaage, and tends to order it whenever given the opportunity to.  However, we were disappointed in this one.  The karaage was not crispy.  It wasn't soggy either, but the outside was just soft.

Karaage

Visually the ramen didn't look very appealing to me.  My soup had already partly congealed when it arrived, so I had to remove the 'skin'.  And the chicken, looked like headcheese.  It didn't have much taste to it, so it was not properly seasoned, even though you can clearly see pepper in the pictures.  The broth was weak in flavour.  Which makes me wonder what they actually use to make the broth.  Unless we went 'too late' at night and they added water to the broth.  Thats what it tasted like to me.  My husband's ramen was slightly better because the garlic seasoning added additional flavour which mine was lacking.  The noodles were cooked well, so no complaint there.  My egg was a little 'roughed' up, it was missing part of the white.  Which is a sign that the eggs are not particularly fresh. The pork belly tasted extra fatty because there was no charing of the pork.  I hate soggy pork fat.

Shio Original Tohenboku Ramen

Garlicky Tohenboku Ramen

Not sure I would make the trip to Tohenboku again.  The flavours just weren't there, which I found shocking because there are so many ramen restaurants out there competition wise.

Tohenboku Ramen
261 Queen St. W,
Toronto, ON
416-596-8080

Hours:  Monday - Saturday 11am - 12am (midnight)
             Sunday 11am - 10:30pm

http://www.touhenboku.ca