The Spring Roll at the Chinatown Restaurant in Halifax was smaller than most, but had a very nice filling. It deserved a 4 out 5 Rating.
I honestly can’t get all that excited about Spring Rolls, really. They are so ubiquitous and can be found on the menus at Taverns, Pizza places, Fish and Chip joints, and many other places that don’t have any other Asian dishes on offer. Most exist somewhere on a continuum ranging from abysmal to mediocre, but the ‘mini’ version at the Chinatown Restaurant in Halifax were a cut above most.
The Spring Roll at Chinatown appeared on the menu as ‘Mini Spring Roll’ and in Chinese characters as ‘迷你春卷’. The past two characters, pronounced ‘chūnjuǎn’ mean ‘Spring Roll’, while the first two are a loan word compound which means ‘Mini’, chiefly because the Mandarin pronunciation of them together is ‘mínǐ’ making it a phonetic representation of the English.
In any event, the Spring Roll at the Chinatown was a cut above the usual in that it did not rely heavily on fillers like Cabbage, Beansprouts, or other ‘filler. There was a pretty generous amount of ground Pork, along with finely minced Carrot, chopped Scallion, shredded Cloud Ear Fungus, and just a few strands of Mung Bean, or Cellophane Noodles.
The wrapper was standard, and not especially remarkable, other than being deep-fried to a pleasant crispiness. The sauce that was delivered on the side was a pretty generic Sweet Chili Sauce, bit it worked nicely. Chinatown makes its own chili oil, which I tried with this, but their version is one of the hottest I have been given in a Dim Sum restaurant, but, while it was fine with some dishes, it was a little bit too hot here and I liked the sweet sauce better. In any event, while I can usually forego this specialty, the Spring Roll at the Chinatown were pretty darned good.