Kirin Seafood Restaurant Coquitlam - 3.5 stars
2001 - 1163 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam, BC, Phone: (604) 944-8833.
The things I like best about going out for dinner are: the opportunity to try new and wondrous foods; having many different tastes and textures in the same meal; and of course, not having to clean up afterwards.
I must be getting jaded in my old age. While Kirin serves up quality ingredients with attentive service, I just can’t get overly excited about the food.
At a recent dinner for 10 people, I was somewhat disappointed. Everything just tasted too much the same.
We started with the appetizer platter - smoked salmon, jelly fish, barbecued pork, steamed chicken. Nicely flavoured - nothing outstanding. We then had the eggplant and scallop hot pot in a spicy sauce. I think this was my favourite dish of the night. The chilis added some zing, and the eggplant was tender yet not over-cooked. More scallops would have been nice, but that is usually the case!
Enoki mushrooms wrapped in beef tenderloin in a garlic sauce - while the texture of the mushrooms was interesting, the sauce itself was boring. The panfried tofu stuffed with shrimp on a bed of broccoli sounds much better than it tasted. The tofu was too mushy, and the shrimp was tasteless. The broccoli was excellent though - both crisp and tender.
The Chinese mushrooms and bok choy dish was typical and uninteresting. Our noodle dish - panfried noodles with beef and peppers - had a nice sizzling sound, but again just didn’t stand up in the flavour department.
Overall, the white table cloths and cleanliness are exemplary, but for the money, you could have a much better meal at many other Chinese restaurants in the city.