For the Love of...: ...ABC Bakery & Cafe (Calgary)

Overall - 7.5/10

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Food - 7/10

Service - 8/10

Ambiance - 7/10

If you are ever in Chinatown and looking for a Hong Kong style breakfast or brunch check out ABC Bakery & Cafe.  With prices ranging from $5-$7 for each menu item which in most cases includes a drink and toast, the meal goes down easy on the tastebuds as well as the wallet.  After your meal, you can also pick up a few tasty baked treats for later.  

To start, we ordered our favourite drinks that came with our meals: hot lemon tea and "Yin Yang" coffee, which is a mixture of coffee and tea with cream and sugar.  

On this occasion Darrin chose to have the beef congee with deep fried doughnut and fried soy sauce noodles.  Congee is cooked and then boiled rice porridge with various additions of green onion, fried shallots, and meat or seafood.  The sliced beef in this particular congee was tender and flavourful and the consistency of the porridge was just right - not too thin or thick.  The crispy fried noodles and deep fried doughnuts balanced the texture of the meal and were just as tasty on their own.

For myself, I ordered the instant noodles with the deep fried chicken breast and buttered toast.  Instant noodles in my opinion are a fabulous breakfast item.  Complementing the noodles is the fried chicken which was crispy on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside- albeit slightly greasy.  Toast can sometimes be overlooked in breakfast meals like this, but being raised solely on whole wheat, this white bread toast, generously buttered was just the treat I needed (you can easily walk off the calories wandering Chinatown afterwards).  

After you are finished you should still have enough in your wallet for the baked buns they sell near the register, which come in a variety of sweet and savoury options. 

Enjoy!