Mom’s Kitchen Korean Cuisine located at 28 South Unionville Ave, Unit #1059 in Markham

May 4, 2021:  I’m finally back with a restaurant review!  I have missed blogging about restaurants for a long time.  Every time we get takeout or delivery, I have wanted to blog about the experience and food, but the spare time I have each day just doesn’t allow for me to sit down and blog.  While I can always blog about it on my smartphone, I prefer writing on my steno machine during a quiet moment, which is hard to achieve these days.  I do intend to go back and fill in my blank calendar with restaurant reviews, but that will be another day.  Today, I’m blogging about this meal that we had from Mom’s Kitchen Korean Cuisine in Markham! 😀  (Baby is napping, and I’m procrastinating on a transcript by writing this blog post.)

We have been ordering Korean takeout frequently recently.  I have been loving kimchi pancakes.  Korean food is such a joy to eat as it’s relatively healthy with wholesome ingredients with a plethora of dishes to choose from.  You can’t beat the additional banchan (side dishes) too.  

This time, we ordered from Mom’s Kitchen Korean Cuisine (28 South Unionville Ave, Unit #1059).  I noticed on the FOD app (Food on Delivery) that they had a 50% off the entire restaurant.  Who doesn’t love a good deal?! 

This restaurant actually has two locations, a Scarborough location and a Markham location.  It was actually only the Scarborough location that offered the 50% off.  For the Markham location though, they still had a 30% off and free delivery to households within 9 km.  Yay! 

We ordered five items to share.  DH placed the ordered around 5:30 p.m. and we received the food around 6:30 p.m.  One con about the FOD app is that it doesn’t tell you what the arrival time is until well after the restaurant has received the order and the driver has picked up the food.  It also doesn’t give you a summary of the order, so I have to screenshot it before I check out.  Otherwise though, the FOD app has really deep restaurant discounts every day (better than UberEats but mostly Asian cuisine restaurants).  

Anyway, I really enjoyed the dishes from Mom’s Kitchen Korean Cuisine!  The food portions were very reasonable, and the prices were excellent (each entree under $14).  The food was put in black plastic containers, styrofoam, or paper containers (for the fried chicken) and then packed into white plastic bags.  It’s important to note if the restaurant is environmentally conscious, so I like to include these parts of the delivery experience too.  

For banchan, we received two small containers of seaweed (delicious, really loved the taste), and then two medium sized containers each of kimchi and pickled radish.  There were two bowls of purple rice (yum, loved the texture of the rice).   

The Original Flavour Fried Chicken was the bomb.  There were five pieces for $11.99.  I loved it.  The fried chicken didn’t have extra batter, wasn’t too oily, and the meat was so smooth and moist.  I definitely would order this again.  They have other flavours of fried chicken too!   (I hadn’t eaten fried chicken in a couple of weeks, so this was such a joy to have. 😋)

Although I had been loving kimchi pancakes, I opted for the Seafood Pancake this time.  I don’t like how the pancake was put into a styrofoam box.  Fried crispy food items like this should be placed into a paper box (like the fried chicken was).  I appreciate that the restaurant poked a hole on the corner of the styrofoam for the heat to escape, but the damage to the pancake was still done.  Pancakes like this need air to circulate to stay crispy.  The Seafood Pancake didn’t have a lot of seafood in it, but it was thick at least (the kimchi pancake we got from Owl of Minerva’s last week was SO thin and disappointing).  I liked that the dipping sauce was more vinegary than the typical salty soy sauce types.  

To my utter shock and surprise, the Spicy Rice Cake was absolutely amazing.  This was truly the best spicy rice cakes I’ve had to date.  I am usually not a fan of tteokbokki because of how dense and hard it becomes after a while.  These spicy rice cakes from Mom’s Kitchen were SO chewy and soft even after I had left it sitting on the table for a while (I devoured the fried chicken and pancake first).  I was amazed.  The spicy sauce was perfect too.  It wasn’t too spicy yet the spice lingered in your mouth after a bite.  This was truly the best tteokbokki I’ve had in Toronto so far.  Even the tteokbokki specialty shop we visited in North York a few years ago didn’t cut it.  

The Black Bean Sauce Noodles was also great.  The black bean sauce was in a separate container from the noodles.  You have mix it all together before eating.  The black bean sauce had such a “homestyle” quality to it.  The noodles were so soft and not overly hard.  This was a really well cooked dish.  

Lastly, the Pork Soon Tofu Soup (non-spicy) was a generous portion.  The plastic bowl was filled to the brim with soup and tofu.  The tofu was silky soft, tasted really fresh, and the pork tasted really fresh too.  I don’t know how to describe it, but there was just a “fresh” taste to it.  My mom really appreciated the silky soft tofu too.  She said it was even softer than the soon tofu soup we had had at Kim’s Tofu a couple of weeks. 

Anyway, I really, really enjoyed our takeout dinner from Mom’s Kitchen Korean Cuisine.  It was so delicious it spurred me to write this blog post right away instead of leaving it for the “I’ll do it later” pile.  I didn’t want to forget the details, and I always wanted to share about how great it was for us.  Great portions, great price (and discount) — we paid less than $60 after tax and delivery tips — and truly great taste.  It had a homemade feel to it.  

One minor thing we all noticed is that we were all a bit thirsty after the meal.  Does that mean there was MSG, or it was just the general nature of the food we chose that made us more thirsty than usual?  Nevertheless, I would recommend this restaurant if you are looking for some great Korean bites.  The Markham location we ordered from was at Langham Place on Kennedy Road south of Highway 7. 

Edit:  One more thing.. I actually wish the Spicy Rice Cakes dish had more rice cakes in it.  The flavour and taste were amazing, but rice cakes was lacking a bit.  It had an egg in it though, which was yummy.  And the same thing for the Seafood Pancake.  This could have had more seafood inside of the pancake.