Sai Woo is a casual Asian fusion food restaurant that uses fresh locally sourced ingredients. Sai Woo has a beautiful modern interior upstairs and a grittier ‘secret’ underground parlour (Woo Bar) downstairs.
They have a Happy Hour from 5:00 – 6:30 PM and they serve 1/2 priced house made dumplings and spring rolls. I’m usually here for dinner, but this time I came a bit early and was able to sneak in a couple happy hour dishes. I came specifically this time for their new menu (specifically their Drunken Seafood Tom Yum Noodles) as advertised on social media and on their website, but unfortunately it wasn’t available when I went.
The filling was flavourful, but the dumpling skin needs work. Most of the dumplings came with their skin already torn. However, I did prefer this over the mushroom dumplings.
Similar to the Pork and Kimchi dumplings, these dumplings suffered from a weak skin. The mushrooms gave the dumpling an earthy flavour, but the overall dumpling didn’t have a very pleasant texture.
The sprouts are out of this world. This is my favourite sprout preparation that I’ve had, and if all vegetables tasted like this, I’d eat them a lot more! The glaze is slightly sweet and worked really well with the fried sprouts.
This is my go-to dish at Sai Woo. I always order it and I love introducing this dish to my friends. The steak is always tender and the glaze is slightly sweet. The cilantro sauce is delicious and I love the textural contrast of the slaw with the butteriness of the beef.
I appreciated the textural contrast of the bamboo shoots and water chestnuts to break up the overall heaviness of the dish. If you’re a fan of traditional Tan Tan noodles made with sesame or peanut paste, this mostly likely won’t do it for you. It’s lacking in spiciness as well, but their housemade hot sauce is a good remedy for that.
This was our final dish of the evening and the biggest let down. The overall flavour profile of this dish was salt. The pork shoulder was a huge salt bomb and unfortunately the kimchi wasn’t fermented enough to break through the saltiness. The pancake wasn’t what we expected (we thought it would be panfried), but I believe these were deep fried and a little over fried. It was extremely crispy and dry.
Sai Woo is one of my favourite restaurants for their creative fusion dishes as well as delicious cocktails. I highly recommend them for a romantic date night and birthday celebrations.
