Tai Pen Restaurant - Calgary

Nice Dim Sum at a reasonable price, great for a nice lunch but parking is not the best. However you can always park on the street and pay the meter. Service is acceptable and food is tasty. Great price for take out orders after 5:00 pm.

Excellent Dim Sum with good variety, costs more than other spots but you get 5 steamed items per container and each are bigger than most other places. Any item with shrimp are to die for as they use plump ones that cost more. Like everything in life you get what you pay for, Tai Pan is a shade costlier but I go the for the best food and not price. Agree with another poster that the Peking Duck is great, but this place is far from a one trick pony, most dishes are very tasty, and btw Cantonese noddles are as varied as the 600 plus languages and dialects in China.

Pork short ribs in black bean 4,5/5 Shrimp pork chive dumplings 3/5 Mini sticky rice 3/5 Tofu skin and shrimp 2/5 Price $25

We were visitors relatives in the city and this place was very close and were told if we ordered take out it was cheaper than eating in. The take out dishes were not bad, no complaints. It was about $8 per dish on selected menu. The next day we decided to try the dim sum with an aunt and uncle who weren't enthused about our choice. The place was somewhat busy but there appeared to be quite a few servers on the floor. The place seemed very disorganized and there didn't seemed to a specific server assigned to our table or area. We always had to hail someone for anything, even just to serve us some tea. None of the servers appeared to be happy to be there. We had to fetch our own take out containers as we didn't want to wait more. The dim sum was not bad but not memorable.

This Chinese restaurant once (about 10 years ago) claimed to serve dishes free of MSG, but now they serve dishes FULL of MSG. From the soup to the dim sums to noodles, because of the significant amount of MSG, after eating, phlegm on the throat can be guaranteed. Some dim sums are just too salty while some deep-fried stuff are rock-hard. MSG-allergic people should be aware. The tea is also not hot enough, and the utensils such as chopsticks and spoons are dirty and sticky. Very disappointing. Worse-still, this restaurant is situated inside a street mall under a condominium on Centre Street N. with very few parking space and poor parking design. On my visit for lunch today, there was a guy in a red car impatiently yelling with abusive 4-letter words at other drivers simply because of his having difficulty getting out of the parking slot, making every visitor to this mall feel unpleasant. Although this might be an isolated case, the tight parking space could just be the cause of the irritation.