Location: 42 Rexdale Boulevard, Etobicoke
Website: https://www.faleyrestaurant.com/
I’ve been meaning to check this place out since reading about it in Corey Mintz’s list of the 50 best restaurants under $50, which was published way back in 2018. Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a backlog of places to check out — I have a custom Google map that I keep updated with all the restaurants I want to try, and it’s currently sitting at over 400 places scattered throughout the GTA.
Well, I’m glad I finally made time for Faley Restaurant, a Hakka joint in Etobicoke — it’s good.
The dish that Mintz singled out is Faley’s Special Gan-Ben Beef, which he described as being “embedded in [his] brain’s craving centre.”
It’s a crispy fried beef dish tossed in a sweet, slightly spicy sauce, and yeah, it’s tasty. In particular, the crispy fried coating on the beef is extremely satisfying, with the beef itself remaining nice and tender.
It is aggressively sweet, however. I found it a bit cloying, but when you combine it with the other dish I ordered, Manchurian style vegetables (a stir-fried vegetable dish with a deeply savoury, mildly spicy sauce), it tempers the sweetness and rounds things out. Both of those dishes are solid on their own, but together, they really come alive.
Michael Eats 