Canton

I'm not naive to expect good Asian food in the big Chinese restaurant, located in typical German country house with reed roof (although I think the house is beautiful!).


But when I saw in my dish cooked chicken filet, chopped in a perfect thin rectangles, I immedietely thought of my Soviet childhood. And even cobination of white asparagus (I expected green), champignons and onion sounded interesting, all they did is just added some more starchy soya sauce. They obviously never heard of creativity.


Good things about this place are definely low price, quick and customer oriented service, friendliness and belive it or not I liked the interior! Although all previous rewievs in German classify it as kitsch (and it probably is), I find it refreshingly nice and unusuall. With ubiquitos clear lines, style and simplicity this was a nice change.

So Canton has been around for at least 30 years (at least that was my last childhood visit to this beautiful reed-thatched house with a view of the local Mercedes dealership at loud Osdorfer Landstrasse). As far as Germany is concerned, that age makes it something like a first-generation Chinese restaurant. And as you'd expect from those times, the interior overdoes it a little on the kitschy fantasy wooden temple interior ... not a problem, but a little fishmoth crawling the table underscored the somewhat dated vibes of the place.

The food could have been taken straight out of a local supermarket's convenience food bins, and not even the Asian ones at that:
A huge spring "roll" tasted almost exactly like the deep-frozen Iglo version, previously frozen, deep-fried and dripping with fat.
The duck was too salty and deep-fried, too. Its dull "Canton"-style sauce tasted exactly like regular brown Maggi condiment...
Let's call the rice and Tsingtao beer authentic.

The restaurant was filled almost entirely with elderly German pensioners who have seemingly bought into the idea that eating deep fried meat in Maggi sauce qualifies as exotic dining, as long as it comes with rice and they have Panda bears on the wall.