T.Pot China Bistro

Food ⁵⁄₅ food here is phenomenal dim sum is great starts early at 9AM.
Environment ³⁄₅ restaurant is fairly clean. Bathrooms are disgusting always smells of urine, doesn’t seem like the clean it ever.
Parking ²⁄₅ Parkin. Is terrible recommend you part at the t&t parking and walk over.
Service ¹⁄₅ staff here are very rude doesn’t care if customers are waiting. Lady at the till talks in her personal phone all the time and talks to her friends instead of helping customers in line to pay or order take out. Tells customers 25 mins and I’ve been here 45 mins and my food is still not ready.

Place isn’t too bad. I think I will be back.

Summary:
— Tasty food with good portions and selections
— Elegant dining atmosphere
— Fair services
— Prices are slightly higher than average but fair
— Excellent waiting list system
— Relatively clean bathrooms
Review:
Be prepared to be receive an electronic disk (and put on the wait list) if you decide to go here between 11am-​3pm. However, you can actually shop around the restaurant until it tells you to go back (by beeping).
The food quality is on the higher end considering all chinese food in Calgary. Majority of the options on both ordering/​dining and dim sum menu are delicious. If you’re vegetarian, ask for the ordering meu because there isn’t much options on the dim sum list.
Tea is free on Monday to Thursday. But if you go on other days, ordering tea would charge you at a flat amount per person (regardless of how much kettles you refill) and this can be expensive of you go with large groups.
Lastly, overall service is great and very responsive. You just need to be a little forceful to get attention from a waitress. However, it can be difficult to catch some service during rush hours (Like any other places at rush hour).

Authentic Chinese food in NW suburban Calgary.
Huge menu with hundred of items and food comes out fresh and delicious.
Dim sum offered here as well as Hong Kong style café food. Pricing is decent as well as portions are big.
Large restaurant with lots of booths and of course round tables with lazy Susan’s.
Overall service is very good.

I have a MSG allergy and can usually tolerate it at restaurants. But wow, I can’t have the food here, on both sides of the restaurant. I’ll get a severe headache and have to crash for a few hours. It’s that hard on my system. This being said it’s my personal physical reaction.
The food taste alright but the service is horrible… The servers just don’t care. The washrooms are dirty and as for utensils and bowls I soak it in the cup of tea they give you. Of course I don’t drink that cup of tea.

Has mediocre dim sum. Make reservations if you plan to come on a weekend! It took them 15 mins to give me a number to wait for a table… Needs a more organized waiting system.

I ate at T-​Pot tonight for the very first time. I was a guest at a Chinese Wedding Banquet. Accordingly, it was a set 13 dish menu, which was selected for us. The service was very quick. The food was plentiful (very large quantities). I didn’t eat everything because there was a lot of fish/​seafood that I just don’t care for, but what I ate, I certainly enjoyed. The staff worked quickly. Certainly no complaints about the food or the service. And because I was a guest, I have no idea if the prices were high/​low/​/​reasonable, so really can’t comment on pricing.
I am giving only 4 stars instead of 5 stars because I visited the ladies room 3 times while I was there and it really needed attending to … badly! Also, the microphone/​sound system that were provided for the speeches etc. were poor quality — it sounded like a «tin» feedback of some kind.
I would definitely go back.
(I took various photos of the food which I will post on here if I can figure out how to do so, because the dishes were impressive — especially the lobster!)

Sweet pork belly, crispy deep fried chicken with garlic and peanuts, seafood fried rice and battered shrimp with special yolk sauce were all good. Deep fried oysters were terrible. Too much batter. Food took long to come out, though. Hot sauce was tasty as it was mild and had garlic in it. Clean restaurant with modern furniture and décor. Good for family style dinners.

The first visit to this restaurant we sat down… Waited for a long time, looked at the menu and left. First impression was extremely authentic Chinese with no idea what to order or how to read the menu, let alone communicate with the server.
My second visit, I was prepared and came with a Chinese friend… Haha. We had Dim Sum and she ordered everything. The food was great and the place was packed. Thank goodness for my friend otherwise I would have been lost and ordered stuff I knew nothing about.
The restaurant always seems busy, and is tailored for the Chinese community. This is not your typical Chinese fried rice and chicken balls. Price seems high but maybe it’s fitting for the authenticity and type of food they serve.

Pros:
— extensive menu of dishes, you can order from both the restaurant menu and café menu
— food tastes great, i really enjoy their dimsum and café dishes
— price is decent and on par w other places
— pretty much open all day, service is quick and nicer than an average Chinese place
Cons:
— I find the restaurant dinner menu is more expensive and portion is smaller. If you want something in the area i would recommend GingerBeef Bistro for dinner instead.
— at dinner, can only get the free dessert soup (thon sui?) if you sit in the restaurant area, not the café one. So if you order from both menus i would recommend sit in the restaurant area.

Well the wontons are great but the soup is subpar. The beef stew lacked flavor and meat or tendons. The dim sum is pretty good and I would rate it above average. The service is lacking here. I’ve had been to better Hong Kong style cafes but it was conveniently located near the airport and Asian market.

Very tasty dim sum and they have another side of the restaurant that’s like a Hong Kong café experience. On that side you can order dim sum and their Hong Kong lunch menu. Service is a ⁶⁄₁₀. But it’s a Chinese restaurant and normally they never have the best service .
So recap for the pros good food, lots of variety, and it doesn’t take long too make compared to other places .
For cons. Service can sometimes be rude, and the price if that’s an issue for you since it’s 1.5times sometimes 2 times more expensive than the other dim sum restaurants I went to. But the price is still reasonable enough for me to go once a week with my family

So going out for dim sum has slowly dwindled from my diet, there used to be a time when I’d be going weekly with the fam jam. What better way to break that streak than to check out T. Pot China Bistro? All my buddies in town along with my sis were raving about how good T. Pot was, which made it pretty surprising how bad their Urbanspoon rating is. Who knew the ‘spoon could be wrong?!! Guess there’s always a first for everything. I can only give my two cents on the dim sum but based on my visit, this place is legit. All their dim sum dishes are fresh and made to order. It even had me reminiscing about HK dim sum.
Located in Country Hills, this place is inconveniently out of the way but it’s worth the drive. The strip mall area is packed with several other Asian restaurants and a T&T Supermarket. We were able to get VIP parking and did not have to wait long to be seated. We came on a Saturday but way past the brunch/​lunch rush, so there was no problem finding a table.
The menu is straight forward — tick off what you want and flag down a waiter/​waitress. Then wait for the goodies to come.
–Siu mai (#14) ($ 5.75) — siu mai came in a fancy, wooden box. A staple item that we always order and it consisted of a mixture of pork and shrimp. Yum.
— Loh mai fun (#29) ($ 6.50) — preserved meat with sticky rice. A good filler and while it didn’t have a lot of meat in it, it was tasty.
— Beef and cilantro cheong fun (#23) ($ 5.75) — we asked for the soya sauce on the side so that my sis could eat it. Otherwise, these rice crepes are normally drenched in a pool of sauce. They were pretty good.
— Har gow (#11) ($ 5.75) — the har gow (shrimp dumplings) were nice and plump. Another staple order that we enjoyed.
— Pan fried dumplings (#13) ($ 6.50) — the pan fried dumplings were delectable. Juicy pork in the inside, good amount of filling and the dumplings had a nice texture/​light crisp to them.
— Loh bak go (#39) ($ 5.75) — good, not too greasy but the fried turnip cakes could have been crispier.
— Thai style vegetables (#80) ($ 7.95) — we wanted some vegetables to eat/​to combat all the meat and grease, so we decided to order their «Thai» style vegetables. That’s in quotations because I have no clue how these are even slightly associated to Thai food. These were basically stir fried vegetables, not a hint of spice or flavours that you’d expect. Definitely pass on this.
— BBQ pork bun with butter and sugar (#9) ($ 5.75) — these were sooooooooooooo good. Piping hot, heavenly clouds of pillowy BBQ pork bun goodness. 100% order these, your taste buds can thank me later.
T.Pot is a great spot to grab some tasty dim sum in Calgary. I will be back to try more of their dishes and of course, for their delicious buns. Bun me up!

Darn good dim sum! Fresh and piping hot. I would say it’s a more refined dim sum than most Chinese restaurants I’ve been to. We were there at 9:15 a.m. and it was already open. The only problem with being that early is that you can’t order some other items that begin at 10 a.m. like choke (porridge). So we lingered and got our choke order in. The tea came and sat on a little candle burner to keep the tea hot.
We ordered:
— Har Kau (Steamed Shrimp Dumplings) — crunchy little shrimp dumplings
— Stu Mai (Steamed Pork and Shrimp Dumplings) — very fresh
— Steamed BBQ Pork Buns with Abalone Gravy (gravy is inside) — superb!
— Steamed Beef Balls — waitress came with scissors to promptly cut these balls up; comes with a side of Worcestershire sauce
— Steamed Stick Rice in Lotus Leaf — delicious!
— Steamed Beef tendon and Daikon — tender tendon
— Shrimp Rice Crêpe — great black sweet salty sauce to pour over the crêpe — yum!
— BBQ Pork Pastry — soft little pockets of delicious BBQ pork
— Pork Liver Porridge or Congee (choke) — bubbling with goodness and cooked to perfection. I would say best place for cheek, ever!
— Chinese donuts — to eat with choke — came a little earlier before cheek came out at 10 a.m. Oh well!
— Sesame Balls — Great balls of fire! These sweet balls were deep-​fried and huge!
— Durian Pastry — The best durian pastry now found in T-​Pot!
I’d come back again! Oh, don’t forget to get condiments of chili paste and chili oil made with little dried baby shrimp. Need these 2 kinds of chili to eat dim-​sum.

You should come with someone who is Chinese on your first visit because T. Pot is so popular with the Chinese communities in the area that it is total chaos at all times. There is no downtime at T. Pot and for good reason.
It’s not the prettiest or cleanest restaurant in Calgary but it ticks all of these boxes for a Chinese one. You get two choices of service: there is the «catch the server as she passes by» or «forcefully waive her down from afar» café side. Or the «bit more calm but you still have to tell them what you need all at once» restaurant side.
Unfortunately there are few choices better in the area, or even in Calgary, so make mental preparations for chaos and be adventurous when you visit T.Pot.

I wish I could love this place as my heart wants to…
I have an obsession with hk style cafes, and this is the closest location I can find.
Their food is okay, but selection is limited compared to cafes in china town. Service is horrid in the bistro side of the resturant, the servers often get irritated when one tries to order in english, as some of the servers have limited english.
They have good tea time deals though. So its a good place for a quick bite.

This is the best most consistent restaurant. For Chinese food in the North as they even time the delivery from the time you order the food and delivery time to your table for the freshness and best taste of the Dim Sum. Dinner is very good too.

Very noisy, crowded and busy place.
If u go during the busy hours especially lunch u would have to wait for a while.
Most of them can’t speak/​talk english but they can understand.
There is variety of foods and they r pretty good.

After many years, I was back to tpot but this time for their dinner. We ordered lots of food and every dish was excellent. I have to say even better than most of the Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area. Consider calgary’s Asian population isn’t as large as SF, I am very impressed of their dish quality. No wonder this place is packed all the time and still around after many years.

yummm!
Dim sum was yummm!
very busy.
–fried salt and pepper tofu
–salty fish and chicken fried rice
–salt and pepper squid
the usual:
— ha gow (shrimp dumpling)
— sui mai (pork dumpling)
— rice crêpe (shrimp, beef, or plain)
— BBQ pork bun
Go … go eat now! :) haha.