Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant

Good Cantonese menu, dim sum featured. Lotus (Pond) Vegetarian Restaurant serves up mainstream Cantonese cuisine, as would be expected in Agincourt, with the unique feature that the dishes are completely vegetarian, often using mock meats.

The menu is many pages long. The dim sum menu is separate from the main menu, and the fixed menu dinners (e.g. dinner for 2) are translated into English on a separate page. My friend and I were debating about whether to have the dim sum (which is rare for a vegetarian restaurant) or the main menu. We decided to start with 4 dim sum dishes, including har gow (corn and other veggies substituted for shrimp), (mock) spareribs with rice rolls in black bean sauce, vegetables wrapped in bean curd (pretty much the same as conventional dim sum restaurants) and curry (mock) beef in deep fried pastry.

With those appetizers complete, we then placed an order for a dish on the regular menu, that had mock shrimp, mock cuttlefish, celery and cashews. Brown rice wasn't an option, so we got two bowls of white rice.

We were impressed by the quality of the dishes that we were served. Definitely a Cantonese chef, and food arrived at the table rapidly. The long menu would tend to suit larger groups, so that more people could taste more dishes.

My friend and I arrived at noon on a Thursday afternoon as the only customers, with maybe 4 or 5 tables filling up in the course of our (slow, 3 hour) stay. The decor would be suitable for business meals, and the tables were covered with tablecloths, even at lunch. The restaurant is in a strip mall on the west side of Midland Avenue, south of Passmore. (Midland doesn't extend down from Steeles Avenue, so drivers from the north will have to circumnavigate. There's a big sign visible on Midland Avenue. The entry into the restaurant is from the parking lot (i.e. the west side of the building, not the east side facing Midland Avenue).

My friend and I are likely to revisit Lotus (Pond) Vegetarian Restaurant in the future. We normally go to Simon's Wok when he's downtown, but Lotus is closer to our office. I doubt that we would ever exhaust the full range of the menu. Carnivores may not miss the meat in the execution of this Cantonese cuisine.