Shangri-la

To celebrate my father-in-law's birthday, my husband and I decided to treat him for dim sum. The best dim sum tends to be in the northeast part of the GTA, so we found ourselves at Shangri-la in Markham.

Restaurant: Shangri-la
Location: Markham
Meal: Brunch
Day: Saturday
Son's Age: 25 weeks

This restaurant is particularly nice because it is also a banquet hall and convention centre. This means that the venue is spacious, well decorated, and clean, and to be honest, it's pretty rare to find a good dim sum restaurant with all these qualities, so that's already a big plus. It's also set up as if for an event (probably to entice people to book their weddings here), which means the tables have clearly marked numbers, so when my in-laws were seated, they let us know which table they were sitting at, which made it much easier to find them once we arrived.

Accessibility: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Since there is a large parking lot, we opted to just bring the car seat in and place it on a chair.

It turns out that if we had decided to bring the stroller inside, there was plenty of room for us to navigate to our table, so that's nice to know for the future. I believe I saw high chairs also but I can't be sure. The washrooms are both large and clean, which is amazing and again could easily accommodate a stroller, but more importantly, there was a change table available.

It's nice because it is not inside the larger stall, nor does it block anyone else using the facilities. From an accessibility perspective, this restaurant is perfect for bringing baby. The noise level in the dim sum restaurant also means that if you have a fussy baby, you don't need to worry about disturbing other patrons, but you can still hear each other and carry a conversation, so again, perfect for bringing a baby.

Service: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Service was unremarkable - in fact, they served our dessert dish first. It's pretty much what you would expect at dim sum restaurants - you mark your order on a paper, your server takes the paper from you, then brings your dishes out as they are ready. Very little interaction, but they get the job done. 

Food: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I always have difficulty rating Chinese food simply because I've had so much that I usually greatly enjoy the food, but can't tell if something is particularly outstanding or just average. I can recognize when the food is bad, though, and the food is not bad at all here. Because dishes are served whenever they're ready, I couldn't capture everything in one photo, so I will just post a bunch and comment intermittently. As I said earlier, we somehow started with dessert, which was a sweetened pancake with peanuts. 

It was sweet but not too sweet, so it wasn't that big an issue that it came first. Next was deep fried taro dumplings and turnip cake with preserved meat. 

Turnip cakes are one of the dishes I almost always order at dim sum, and this place did not disappoint. I don't typically have taro dumplings though, and these were really good - crunchy on the outside but smooth on the inside. Then we had siu mai with fish roe and beef balls. 

Both these dishes were tasty, as expected. We also had beef tripe with ginger and green onion as well as spare ribs.

These dishes were both fine albeit unmemorable. We ordered some congee for the table.

Again, fine but not memorable. This was followed by bean curd rolls.

This was nice and juicy - they did not skimp on the sauce here. Finally, the last dish was char siu bao, or buns with BBQ pork.

This was a good finish to the meal, and pretty much what you'd expect for a char siu bao. Overall, I was very satisfied with the food, and there is a decent amount of variety that you can order from, which is great when you are eating with a large group of people.

Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This is probably one of the better dim sum restaurants to take your baby. The food is great and the place is clean and spacious. Not to mention, the presentation of the food is slightly nicer than most Chinese restaurants. I would definitely come here again.