Noble Seafood

For my cousin's birthday, my family got together for a big banquet dinner in Markham. Now, going to Markham is a bit of a trek for me, which makes arriving on time difficult because I rarely get out of the house on time as it is, plus traffic issues have a higher impact on a longer journey. Additionally, I had to be home before my son's bedtime. This means that I was about half an hour late and I had to leave early, so I cannot comment on the entire meal or experience end to end.

Restaurant: Noble Seafood
Location: Milliken
Meal: Dinner
Day: Sunday
Son's Age: 6 months

This restaurant is fairly new and meant to be high end Chinese food with a bit of fusion elements. Unfortunately, there is no website that I can find, and as I mentioned, I was late arriving, so I don't actually know what all the dishes are, nor can I cross reference with any menu online. I'll do my best, so here goes.

Accessibility: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Being in Markham, the restaurant has an attached parking lot. Furthermore, the restaurant has quite a bit of space, so I had no trouble bringing my son in his car seat.

The washroom also had a proper change table available, which is always appreciated.

I particularly like that the change table wasn't inside a stall, and there was enough room that I could have brought a stroller in. I believe they also had high chairs available, so very baby friendly all around.

Service: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
So the service is a bit difficult to rate, because I think the servers really were doing their best, but the situation was just...odd. First of all, I was half an hour late, and my family was just sitting down. Apparently, they had been seated at a table with lots of flies hovering around, so they requested to be moved. I didn't personally experience this, but the previous table was pointed out to me, and it was farther away from the entrance than the new table, so I don't really understand why there would be a lot of flies over there. Then, at the new table, my family noticed it was quite drafty, which I suspect was because we were now by the door but my aunts insisted was a result of the air conditioning. I guess they were right because this was later corrected. The pacing between courses was also a bit off; usually for Chinese banquets, each course is served after 10-20 minutes to give people a chance to finish one dish at a time, for the most part. In this case, some dishes were served really close together, while others had larger gaps of time. When I left, which was an hour and a half later, they were still waiting for rice, noodles, and dessert. My cousin asked me to wait because we had already been waiting a while so surely they would be served quickly, but unfortunately my son was beginning to fuss do I had to excuse myself. I found out afterward that they waited an additional 20 minutes before the rice and noodles arrived, so it was a good thing I left. As far as the rest of the service went, the servers didn't seem to be accustomed to portioning the food out, since some people had significantly more food than others, so finally my family asked them not to divvy up the food for us and instead let us serve ourselves. I've rated service three stars because the actual experience was pretty abysmal, but admittedly the servers did their best to improve the situation and accommodate requests. So...A for effort?

Food: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
So I will try my best to describe the dishes. We started with suckling pig, served with jellyfish and seaweed.

Suckling pig is typically served with jellyfish but not with seaweed. It was an interesting choice, and I quite enjoyed it, so it was quite a promising first course. Next there was a deep fried taro dish. I didn't get a photo of the whole dish, but here is my portion on my plate next to the suckling pig.

I was pretty excited for this because it looked good, and I must say it was disappointing in that it was shockingly bland. It seemed like a good concept but didn't really work for me. Next was a dish with scallops, chicken, and squid.

There was some celery in here too. Usually this kind of dish includes snow peas or some kind of green vegetable, but not in this case. They were quite generous with the number of large scallops, so that was definitely a plus. Next was the soup.

I have no idea what kind of soup this was, but I think there was abalone in it? It was okay, but not as flavourful as I expected it to be. After this was the lobster.

I think this lobster was steamed with butter, which sounds normal but is actually atypical for a Chinese banquet. Somehow, this made the lobster more bland than anticipated and as such, kind of disappointing. After this was the fish.

I have to be honest - as I'm writing this, I have no recollection of this one, which isn't very promising. Finally, there was chicken stuffed with sticky rice.

This was pretty good, but by no means unique to this restaurant. As I mentioned earlier, I missed the rest of the dinner, so this was the last course I ate.

Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Accessibility is great, and this restaurant is incredibly baby friendly in that regard. The service was strange, although like I said, the servers were really trying their best. The food is interesting and different but not really my favourite. Overall, this isn't a bad place to take a baby at all.