culture
Spice City Toronto: Gourmet Garden
Check out these southeast Asian street eats in Scarborough
Gourmet Garden
4465 Sheppard Avenue East
Sunday through Thursday: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
(Closed Tuesday)
Behind a nondescript plaza in Scarborough that’s otherwise filled with shady massage joints, there’s a small building housing a food court. If you like spicy Asian street food, it’s worth the trek to check out Gourmet Garden Malaysian and Singaporean Cuisine.
This place has a big menu of Malaysian, Singaporean, and Indonesian rice and noodle dishes and curries selling from $5 to $8. If you come on a weekend before the dinner hour, you’ll see people picking up giant batches of food for family gatherings at home. Customers tend to be immigrants from Southeast Asia or South Asia.
The restaurant is run by the husband and wife team of Tan “Yummy” Hok Kien, who hails from Java, Indonesia, and Amy Lam, from Ipoh, Malaysia. Amy (above) and the team of cooks handle the day-to-day orders while Yummy fields calls at his job as a computer-support tech while moonlighting at the restaurant.
Yummy says Gourmet Garden’s setup and recipes are modelled after street vendors, called hawkers, who run food stalls in Asia. “Hawking is like calling out; it’s like the sound a bird makes,” says Yummy. “Here, people pay and sit down and we call out their order, like hawkers do in Asia when your food is ready.”
We ordered soto ayam, a giant, tasty Indonesian soup made with chicken, vermicelli, and tumeric. The chicken satay skewers didn’t have the best quality meat, but the satay sauce was delicious. My favourite was mee goreng, a giant plate of fried spicy noodles with bean sprouts, green onion, fish cake, and squid.
Another good dish was the nasi lemak (above), coconut rice served with curry chicken and sambal prawn curry. The prawn curry is sweet when you first taste it, but it’s followed by a powerful spicy kick. This version is a deal for just $6.50, but you might be better off getting the smaller snack version of the dish, which sells for around two bucks—according to Yummy, it’s served wrapped on a banana leaf and features a spicier, more authentic recipe.
If you’re feeling adventurous, top the meal off with an ais kacang. This is a dessert made of crushed ice and topped off with everything but the kitchen sink. The ice is sweetened with syrup and comes with strings of jelly, salted peanuts, creamed corn (!), red beans and sweet basil seeds that taste like tapioca. Yes, it is just as disgusting as it sounds but worth trying just once for an unforgettable culinary experience.
Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. To view more photos of Gourmet Garden Malaysian and Singaporean Cuisine and its dishes, click here.