Bright Pearl - Ehhhh, not a bright idea to dine here! (Toronto, ONT)

Bright Pearl in Toronto Chinatown

After realizing the day before that we landed in Toronto in the mist of a long holiday weekend, we were faced with closed shops and restaurants. So much for breakfast at St. Lawrence Market, thus it's we had to alter our itinerary and head towards Chinatown. Hey, as we all know, Chinese people never close their shops for major holidays. As predicted, Chinatown was packed with people and we were ready to get some grub. What's better than some dim sum, right?

O~ Canada

One shocking display that I was met with upon arrival, and sadly didn't take a picture of was 3-4 people cooking various dishes on portable stoves in the lobby. I mean, WTF?? We were too hungry to worry about that as our hostess led us to our table, and it was time to eat!

Fried Tofu (炸豆腐)



Glutenous Rice (糯米雞)



Jellyfish (海蜇皮)



BBQ Bun (叉燒包)



Shrimp Dumplings (蝦餃)



Siu Mai (燒賣)



MaLai Cake (馬來糕)

One thing I noticed immediately about the Bright Pearl was that it was lacking Chinese people, as most of the crowd were mostly Caucasian. Now, even though I'm used to hordes of Chinese folks fighting in line with me at dim sum, I was way too hungry to care at this point. I wish my intuition got the better of me. Of all the dishes shown above, nothing was memorable, in fact, some were pretty bad. The Ma Lai cake was dry, the fried tofu was quite bland, the glutenous rice was probably the WORST version I've ever had (WTF was with that presentation?)! I could probably find faults with all of the dishes shown. What's even more astounding was the final tab presented to us at the end. Our 7 dishes cost more than 40CAD, which with tax/tip ended up being about 15CAD (~$13/person). For subpar, tasteless dim sum, that was definitely a ripoff. In fact, the dim sum here couldn't even compared to the shack in the San Gabriel Valley called Dim Sum Express.

I really hate to bag this place and sound like a heinous food blogger, thus I had reservations about blogging this place, but our experience was quite bad. Even with 3 hungry stomachs going in, none of the dishes satisfied us. It was quite disappointing, along with the rest of the Chinatown in Toronto. The streets might be large and clean, but when the food was piss poor, who cares about cleanliness? Bright Pearl, and Toronto Chinatown, you might have been open, but you truly failed me!

Final Rating: 3 out of 10 (AVOID!)

Bright Pearl Seafood
346 Spadina Avenue
Toronto, ON M5T 2G2, Canada
(416) 979-1103