Right outside Cote-Vertu metro station sits Fu Kam Wah, my newest discovery in Chinese cuisine. I’m often in the St-Laurent area when lunchtime rolls around, so finding new places to eat is a must. This restaurant fills all the lunch prerequisites: tasty, affordable and quick.

A steaming cup of tea is poured as you sit at the table. With the exception of some dark rum, nothing warms the winter-heart like piping hot green tea. There’s a special lunch menu, as well as a chef’s menu, as well as the regular menu. This time around, we tried the lunch specials, and were happily satiated.

Every meal on the lunch menu comes with a choice of wonton or hot and sour soup, a spring roll, sautéed vegetables and either steamed or fried rice, along with the main meal. That’s a lot of food for $6 - $8 (tax included)! Choices of mains include the expected general tao chicken, sweet and sour chicken or pork, chop suey with BBQ pork, and orange beef. More interesting dishes include the scrambled eggs with tomato (?), sliced beef with a black bean sauce, Chinese mushrooms with tofu and shrimp in lobster sauce. We opted for the seafood curry and the general tao chicken.

But first, the hot and sour soup. It doesn’t beat out my favourite hot and sour soup, bit it’s okay. Not nearly as spicy as I like it, but packed with ingredients, redeeming the lack of heat. Tofu, mushrooms, a few shrimp, pork and green onions in a gelatinous broth – tasty and filling, but not as hot or as sour as I like it.

Next up, the mains! I appreciated my spring roll; again, deep-fried and jam-packed with ingredients! The sautéed veggies were excellent, bok choy, broccoli, sweet peas and onions all expertly cooked so that they remained crispy.
The general tao chicken was, like the hot and sour soup, good. Nothing fantastic – again, it lacked the heat that I appreciate in dishes like that. However, it was nicely sweet, with enough extra sauce to make the rice interesting, and an excellent dough-to-chicken ratio.

The seafood curry was…interesting, and extremely satisfying. The yellow curry sauce was strong-tasting, and had a strange (but not unappealing) viscous quality to it. It was not cheap with the seafood, filled with excellently prepared squid (often hard to find!), shrimp, scallops and crabsticks that were also very good quality, sweet and not pasty at all.
One of the things I appreciated was the hot sauce served, which you have to ask for. No Rooster squeeze bottle here! They bring you a little dish of extremely spicy and wonderfully tasty sauce, swimming in a flavourful oil. Nice touch!

I’ve been there once before, and ordered off the normal menu. I have to recommend the sizzling shrimp in black bean sauce and the salt and pepper squid; absolutely perfect in all ways. End it with a fortune cookie, and call it a successful meal! Don’t be looking for life’s answer’s with your fortune though; both my co-diner and I got the same fortune, along with the same lucky numbers.

Fu Kam Wah is fantastically affordable, and the quality of food is just right. I’ll be making several lunchtime visits, and I’d even recommend a couple of dinner ones too.

Fu Kam Wah
1180 Decarie (Ville St-Laurent)
(514) 337-2262