Sprawled on the outskirts of downtown Barrie, a stone-throw away from the mighty 400 expressway, lies a fairly busy Chinese restaurant that is tucked inside a concrete jungle of a parking lot. The aesthetics of the The Dragon's surrounding area is an echo of what goes on inside, as the food and service struggles to keep up with the busy demand that the high density neighborhood creates. I witnessed an example of this when I noticed many customers waiting well past their promised wait time for take out orders while one employee danced around the restaurant, trying her best to make sure everyone dining inside was getting their drinks, at the same time trying to coordinate take out orders. I got lost in the mix, and was unable to get a refill of diet Coke. This caused a serious problem as the food was absolute shit for the exception of one or two items. As you probably know, being unable to wash down bad food makes the experience of eating bad food even worse. However, something tells me the people who frequent The Dragon believe they are eating exotic foods from far-away lands, and probably make reservations to eat at this below-average neighborhood restaurant. From here I could start talking about what chemicals the city of Barrie uses to clean their water supply, but we'll leave that for another ignorant/humorous debate and just keep the good people who live on north Essa Road thinking they are dining in style.
On to the food, there were two items that I enjoyed: the barbecued pork, which was cut into sweet thick chunks, and the Cantonese noodles, which was drowning in oil and lacked any sort of cooked vegetable or meat.
Now here is where The Dragon gets interesting. They have deep fried pineapple chunks and deep fried imitation crab meat as items in their buffet. I haven't seen something that adventurous since the days of deep fried milk at Raymond's in Victoria, B.C. As you probably guessed, I took a bite of each item, and lay the rest on the discard plate. I like my pineapple cold and refreshing, not piping hot and blanketed in batter that completely rids the tropical fruit of its taste, let alone its supposed nutritional value. Now as for the imitation crab meat, they label it deep fried crab meat, but anybody who has eaten a California roll at Fujiya knows what they're really getting here. The typical person who eats at The Dragon probably doesn't know the difference. The egg rolls tasted like paper filled with dirty sprouts.
The dessert section is a bit of an upgrade from their hot entree bar simply because of their use of Chapman's Ice Cream. There are four types to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, chocolate mint and strawberry. I didn't try the other desserts like vanilla cake or mini-cookies, but I took one bite out of some sort of mini-cream puff and spit it out.
Price for Dinner: $13.45 including taxes and a soft drink
1.4/5
1.4/5
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