Lunch at Dickens Cafe (Richmond Hill)

Located at 9425 Leslie Street in Richmond Hill

Last week, for lunch, my mom and I went to Richlane Mall for food. It was my first time to this mall in a while and its Cantonese translation is “rich eat street”, meaning a street or plaza full of amazing food! I was in the mood for some good old Hong Kong style cafe, so we headed to Dickens Cafe. In Richlane Mall, there are also assortments of Japanese, Korean, BBQ, traditional Chinese food, and even a dessert and macaron place.

Richlane Mall on a beautiful blue autumn day

I was super excited to see all these restaurants and eateries that I had never ventured into before. I already made a mental note that we’ll be visiting Richlane Mall much more often in the future. 🙂

Dickens Cafe has free wifi service! 🙂

Dickens Cafe is a Hong Kong style cafe that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner combos. They have free wifi! It’s not super nicely decorated but it’s painted in a warm-ish white colour with some decal on the walls for it to be comfortable and cozy. The service here is very attentive and warm. In my opinion, it’s a higher grade of HK-style cafe than most of the ones that I am used to.

Lunch Specials menu

Light Lunch menu

My mom and I shared two Lunch Specials with complimentary soup and coffee or tea (they also have a Light Lunch menu which features breakfast-like items like scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, etc.). We ordered the Smoked Salmon and Chicken in Cream Sauce Pasta. You could choose between different pastas like spaghetti, fettuccine, fussilli, angel hair, or penne, which I thought was different from most HK-style restaurants that offer just spaghetti as a staple pasta. I chose the angel hair pasta and added $1 for the soup upgrade to a Clam Chowder. We also ordered a Curry Ox Tongue with Rice that came with a pumpkin cream soup.

Garlic bread and cream of pumpkin soup!

The pumpkin cream soup arrived first with two slices of garlic bread. Yum! I didn’t expect garlic bread to be part of the meal as well. I love garlic bread! The picture shows it to be too slices of garlic bread that might be crunchy, but when you take it in your hand and eat it, it’s actually very soft and bread-y. It was really good! The pumpkin cream soup was also very creamy with small chunks of pumpkin, smelled great, and very delicious. I think they must have added vanilla extract or extra butter to make it taste that great.

Delicious and soft garlic bread!

Clam Chowder soup. +$1

The Clam Chowder soup arrived shortly and was also very delicious; they sure know how to make soups here! It was just as creamy as the one first and this one contained carrots, cucumbers, and small clams. There weren’t many in it, which disappointed me a little about this clam chowder. However, the creaminess of the soup was impressive still!

The Smoked Salmon and Chicken in Cream Sauce Angel Hair Pasta and Curry Ox Tongue with Rice arrived. Yay! The Angel Hair Pasta was so fine and thin and coated well with the cream sauce. It was really good. I liked how the cream sauce was delicious and not too over-empowering. The slice of smoked salmon was thin and broke when you tried to pick it up. It was a little saltier than usual smoked salmon. The chunks of chicken inside the dish were pretty good too. I loved how fine and soft the angel hair pasta was. It actually reminded me of Asian fine vermicelli more than western angel hair pasta — western style is usually more firm and stringy. Nevertheless, it was very good.

Smoked Salmon and Chicken in Cream Sauce Angel Hair Pasta. $8.99

The Curry Ox Tongue with Rice arrived separately with the white rice on a plate. I thought that it would have been baked together — I think it’s more delicious that way. The ox tongue slices were very, very tender and soft — delicious! The curry was actually spicy!

Curry Ox Tongue with Rice. $8.99

In the end, we couldn’t finish everything and took the latter dish home. We finished off with the complimentary tea. I almost always order hot water with lemon — it’s just good for digestion and I’m not a coffee fan anyway.

Hot lemon water

I think Dickens Cafe serves really good food and has great service. Perhaps it’s in this area that the price is a bit higher than most HK-style cafes though. Have you been here before? 🙂