Tasty Kuwaiti Food at Walima

Walima
Location
: 1185 Dundas Street East, Mississauga
Website: https://www.instagram.com/walimarestaurants/

I’ll sometimes browse Google Maps when I’m looking for new restaurants to check out; generally speaking, the ratings tend to hover between 4 and 4.5 out of 5.  Walima, on the other hand, is sitting at a cool 4.7 with over 1800 reviews as I write this.  I’m assuming the restaurant has encouraged their customers to submit 5-star reviews, but still, I felt like I had to check the place out.

Walima

They serve Kuwaiti cuisine, and the majority of the menu consists of lamb, fish, or chicken served on rice.  I went with the maqlooba, which comes with your choice of lamb or chicken (I went with lamb).  It seems a bit pricey at 27 bucks — until you realize that this is a shareable platter rather than a dish for one (it can easily feed two or three).

Walima

Yeah, okay — I get the rating.  It’s a tasty dish.  It’s maybe a bit on the oily side (I think the rice is cooked with the fatty lamb, and it’s absolutely suffused with grease), but it tastes quite good, and the pieces of lamb are melt-in-your-mouth tender.

Walima

The dish also features fried onions and creamy chunks of eggplant, which both complement the lamb quite well.  It comes with a couple of hot sauces on the side — a red chili oil, and a green chili sauce.  They both do a nice job of kicking up the rice and meat.

There’s also a little bowl of tomato soup on the side.  I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be eaten separately or with the rice; I ate it with the rice, and I’m still not sure if that was the intended way to eat this, but it was tasty regardless.

Tasty Soup at Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef

Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef
Location
: 3380 Midland Avenue, Scarborough
Website: None

Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef is a great under-the-radar Chinese restaurant; they’ve got a whole bunch of tasty looking noodle dishes on the menu (not to mention a lamb bun that it seemed like most of the other tables were ordering — I’ll have to come back to try that one), but their specialty is paomo, a delicious lamb soup.

Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef

They serve a regular version and a spicy version; I went with the spicy version.

The thing that makes this dish stand out are the chopped-up pieces of flatbread interspersed throughout.  They’re kinda like very thick, chopped up noodles; they have a great amount of chewiness to them (they’re not soggy or mushy at all) and bring the soup a ton of personality.

Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef

The bowl is also crammed with a generous amount of sizable pieces of tender lamb.  It’s a hearty soup, that’s for sure.

Tang Home Style Lamb and Beef

As for the broth, it’s mildly spicy and has a very zesty, slightly sweet flavour.  I liked it on its own, but it really comes alive once you add some of the smoky chili oil that’s on the table.

Unique Chinese Food at Tangritah Kabab House

Tangritah Kabab House
Location
: 900 Rathburn Road West, Mississauga
Website: None

One of the things I like about living in Toronto is that not only is pretty much every country’s cuisine available to try (which I explore in another blog, 196 Plates — I think it might be about time to bring that one back), you can actually get so much more specific than that.

Tangritah Kabab House

This place — which specializes in Uyghur cuisine — is a great example of this.  “Chinese food” tends to be put under one enormous umbrella, but China is a huge country, and its food is wildly different from region to region.

Tangritah Kabab House

I tried a few things here, and it was all extremely delicious.  First up: a dish the menu only refers to as “fried meat.”  I think it was beef, though it might have been lamb (if it was, it didn’t have much of a lamby flavour).  Either way, it was super tasty, with a bunch of tender meat, nicely cooked onions, and a very cumin-tinged flavour that was extremely addictive.

Tangritah Kabab House

Next up was the Tangritah Special Langmen, which is an Uyghur dish in which hand-pulled noodles are topped with stir-fried veggies and meat.  The flavour here was a bit less distinctive than the fried meat, but the noodles had a really satisfying chewiness, and the veggies and meat were perfectly cooked (again, I’m not sure what the meat was, but I’m gonna say beef).

Tangritah Kabab House

Finally, I tried the samsa, a bun filled with a mix of lamb and onions.  This looks like it might have initially been crispy on its exterior, which would have been nice, but it was either steamed or microwaved to reheat and was soft throughout.  Regardless, it was quite tasty.

A Solid Wrap at Shah’s Halal Food

Shah's Halal Food
Location
: 65 Duncan Street, Toronto
Website: https://www.shahshalalfood.ca/

Shah’s Halal Food has a pretty straightforward menu; it’s basically just chicken, lamb, and falafel that you can either order on rice or as a wrap.  Apparently it’s a chain with a whole bunch of locations in the States and the UK, and yeah, that checks out.  It tastes like chain food.

Shah's Halal Food

Still, it’s not bad.  I went with the lamb gyros, which comes absolutely crammed with lamb, veggies, black beans, chick peas, hummus, and three different sauces: white sauce, hot sauce, and green sauce.

The lamb itself is probably the weakest part of the sandwich; it comes out of a metal warming tray looking like the saddest, grayest cubes of meat that you’ve ever seen, and it has a spongey reconstituted meat flavour.  It’s not great.

Shah's Halal Food

But the sandwich is so crammed with stuff that this is barely even an issue — I wish it were a bit spicier (it’s basically not spicy at all), but it’s zippy, crunchy, and flavourful, and the soft but substantial pita does a good job of holding it all together.

Tasty, Meaty tacos at Gus Tacos

Gus Tacos
Location
: 1533 Queen Street West, Toronto
Website: https://tacosgus.ca/

Gus Tacos have three locations in the GTA; they’re clearly successful for a reason.  My tacos were great, and my dining companion raved about his burrito.  Supposedly, the tortas are quite good as well.  Clearly, I need to come back.

The woman behind the counter mentioned that the barbacoa (braised lamb) taco is their most popular choice; I ordered that along with the chilorio, which turned out to be very similar to the barbacoa, but with pork.  Probably not the best two choices, as they were both along the same lines — but when the tacos are this delicious, it really doesn’t matter.

The tortillas were obviously fresh, which is a must, and while both tacos were tasty, the barbacoa wasn’t kidding around.  If you like the slightly gamy flavour of lamb, this is absolutely the taco for you.  It’s super tender, flavourful, and thoroughly delicious.  So good.