Trip to Brossard with Chef Andersen Lee

(Brossard) Before we were drooling over tables of plenty on social media, there was… dim sum! “When the food starts to arrive, it hits hard!” says Andersen Lee. The tablecloth is quickly covered with intriguing little bites. We challenged the chef of the Oncle Lee restaurant to organize a little gourmet trip for us in his native Brossard.

Uncle Lee is a Chinese-inspired restaurant. Before having his name on a sign on Laurier Avenue West—the uncle in question is a family friend!—Andersen Lee was chef at Le Cadet. He wanted to cook closer to his roots. His father is from Hong Kong and his mother is from Taiwan. “I would say that my restaurant is inspired by Montreal’s Chinatown, but also by the dishes that I ate when I was little that weren’t necessarily super typical.” A few layers of crossbreeding later, Andersen Lee’s Chinese cuisine has its own identity.

Although he spends most of his time in the heart of the metropolis, the chef still lives in Brossard. So there was no better guide to open the doors of Hong Kong and Cantonese restaurants in the southern suburbs for us. In our case, it was not one guide, but three—Andersen invited his dad, Chi Keung, and his friend Philippe Chin—who made sure we tasted the most unmissable bites.

Without them, the experience could have been intimidating, especially since the little carts that used to move between tables, allowing for visual choice, have been put away. That said, the menu at Impérial, which moved from Montreal’s Chinatown to Brossard in 2019, is particularly clear, with photos and descriptions to back it up.

It is better to have several eaters around one of the large round tables with a rotating plate at the Impérial, on the famous Taschereau Boulevard.

Also, two of Uncle Lee’s cooks with keen curiosity and appetites also participate in the feast. You can order many more dishes and even dare to try the less accessible chicken feet, steamed tripe and other specialties often snubbed by the uninitiated when you know that there will surely be two or three more adventurous mouths to devour them.

“Dim sum means ‘touching the heart’. The food is not secondary, but almost. The pretext is above all to get together,” explains Philippe, a great dim sum connoisseur who works in the dining room at Liverpool House. It was his father who introduced the “dragon beard” candy to Montreal, in Chinatown.

Andersen remembers eating dim sum as a child at Xin Jing Hua with his mother and sister. The Taschereau Boulevard location is now closed. “On Sundays, I would see my kung fu teacher, my Chinese school teachers, it was a real community center.”

On a Tuesday lunchtime, it’s a little less festive, but the restaurant is busy. At our table, the champagne (an excellent pairing!) is flowing freely. Papa Chi has even brought a case of Heineken.

Room for dessert?

We save some room for dessert. But there is no question of taking a “healthy stroll” on Taschereau Boulevard. It is better to jump in the cars to go to the next destination, which is in the Place Portobello shopping center, a kilometer and a half from Impérial.

You can eat a more than complete meal at Deer Garden Signatures in Brossard: curries, paella, stir-fried spaghetti and marinated pig’s trotters included. But we’re here for the Hong Kong-style milk tea and the fried French toast with peanut butter and condensed milk. “There used to be another Hong Kong-style cafe. I would go there after elementary school to eat French toast with my mom. Both of my childhood locations were in strip malls which are now almost abandoned.”

At the Deer Garden, in the back of a large, charmless dining room, it takes ages before we get served. If a human ends up taking the order, a robot brings it to the table!

Because that’s not rich enough, each cube of golden-brown fried bread is topped with a small square of butter. Andersen Lee suspects that the amber liquid in the plastic container is some kind of “pole syrup,” but it’s not. It’s real maple. Admittedly, this is a pretty remarkable dessert, in the kind that sticks to your ribs.

To digest gently, we head to the mini-golf course in La Prairie. It is probably one of the prettiest 18-hole courses in Quebec, with its bridges, pools, caves and well-kept landscaping. Andersen Lee used to go to Cascades Golf when he was little, “but even more so as an adult, haha,” he admits.

One game later, it’s already aperitif time! We should be able to find a place to quench our thirst at DIX30. The chic Bar Les Cousins, in the Escad hotel of the Germain Hotels group, seems to be the most welcoming option. We stick to a cocktail and have a good time.

It was only a few weeks later that we learned of the existence of La buvette du quartier, where we could undoubtedly have drunk good cocktails and more artisanal wines than those offered at Les Cousins.

We parted ways promising to come back and try the Sichuanese restaurant Tian Fu together. But it was listed as closed for several weeks after the epic trip. Luckily, Google recently announced its reopening. Brossard, we’ll see each other again soon!

Visit the Imperial restaurant website

Visit the Deer Garden Signatures website