Konner Chinese Restaurant

I had higher expectations based on reviews and unfortunately they weren’t met.
Perhaps, it’s how we ordered but I would call this more Sichuan than Hunan. We had:
Griddled Cabbage with Pork: This was delicious, served over an open flame. The cabbage still held its crunch, however, there was very little pork. The photo showed large strips and we found ourselves digging through the cabbage with our chopsticks to find a small piece.
Spicy Fish: This turned out to be the Sichuanese Shui Zhu or water boiled fish. It was good, they used very few Sichuan peppercorns taming the ma la flavour.
Kung Pao Chicken: We asked for SPICY, but it arrived with very little heat, the vinegar was good.
I don’t think we’ll be giving Konner a return visit, perhaps it’s how we ordered. Note that afterwards both me and dining companion had uncomfortable stomachs– another reason we won’t return.

One of my friends brought me here. The steamed fish head was great. The meat was tender and the sauce was spicy. The other dishes we had were also very good although we didn’t order many spicy dishes. I’m looking forward to coming back here and trying some of the spicier dishes!

I am from Chongqing and this place is SO DELICIOUS YUM YUM! Every dish my friend ordered (more than 10) were super good. There was one dish with beef and was in bamboo shoot tasted so good we actually ordered it again cuz we ate it so fast!
I would love to visit this place again.

stinky tofu: not stinky at all. just normal deep-​fried tofu
steamed pork with taro (fen zheng rou): tasted nasty. i almost threw up. it was ground pork with lots of sticky rice and starch.
sichuan stype cold noodle: bad. just soy sauce with noodles. too salty
spicy and sour vermicelli: not authentic, but edible.
i probably ordered the wrong food, because non of the ones i ordered were typical hunan dishes.
atmosphere and service were not bad.

I am from Hunan (born and raised) and this is the closest flavour to Hunan cuisine i’ve tried in the Toronto region. If you are giving this place 1 star you are ordering the wrong things or you just don’t have the right appetite for spicy food.
The flavour is original. The food is made well. The service is amazing. I have no complaints.
Must tries:
Dried cucumber skin with preserved pork
Bamboo shoots with preserved pork (#300 on their menu)
Pu Dou Jiao

I love Hunan food, and have been looking for a good place in Toronto. This place is really good. The dishes were really flavourful (especially the lamb dishes). Great Hunan food. It’s definitely spicy but not overwhelming.
The portions are pretty decent. Two dishes (plus rice) would be enough for 2 with leftovers to spare.
They have a membership where you pay $ 20 to join and you can get cheaper prices on most dishes… Il be signing up for that. Also looks like they have good deals on the lunch specials.
Will definitely return (again and again)

I rarely write reviews online. However, the dish they served today was just beyond acceptable. The dish’s name was spicy incense pot.
First, instead of using chilli, the dish used chilli seeds to create spicy flavor. The dish was covered with hundreds or thousands of chilli seeds. This choice was just surprising. I lived in China for more than twenty years and had been to many Sichuan and Hunan restaurants. None of them use chilli seeds only in their dishes. This definitely cut their cost but it created a very bad feeling when chewing the dish.
Second, the majority of the dish is green pepper, potato, and oinion. Are you kidding? Potato is the only valid material for spicy incense pot. The rest two can never taste good in spicy incense pot. Again, they probably just want to cut the cost.
Third, I found two or three shrimps and a few squid rolls, which constituted all the meat in the dish. However, the shrimps were not fresh at all. I can’t tell the quality of those squid rolls.
All in all, I ordered a dish that has become very popular in Chinese restaurants in the last few years, expecting some spicy food of average quality. However, the dish I ate today was really disappointing. In fact, I could not even finish the dish because of tons of chilli seeds all over every piece of potato, green pepper, and onion. I walked out very hungry.

Even better now! They are a top notch fast food Sichuan Chinese restaurant. Take out or stay in. Kung Pao Chicken is fabulous.

Update. Returned here yesterday for lunch after a several month hiatus (just too many fabulous new places to check out in the city’s eastern reaches!). Konner has a new menu, with some stunning additions. We had the smoked tofu and sliced pork with chile, which was excellent, and rabbit done on a table top hot pot — this was splendid, with different chiles, including a perfect amount of ma la, the «numbing spice.» A side order of scallion pancake made for great mopping up the extra sauces. Sadly one of my favourites, the whole shrimp fried with tea leaves is no longer listed, but there are several new dishes to work one’s way through.

I went to this place with my friends, one of them is a native Hunnanese. He said this restaurant is the best hunnan restaurant in Toronto.
Another friend that went with us is a native hongkonger, so he basically just sit aside ate some non spicy dishes we ordered for him and watch us eat all the spicy ones since they are all way too spicy for him.
First of all, I love the food, after I ate here, I even ordered extra dishes to take home.
The dishes that I like and actually remember are cold dishes eggplant, deep fried pepper with preserved egg, steam fish head with hot peppers, stir fried pickle cowpea with minced pork.
I don’t like their stir fried green pepper with pork slice or any of the preserved pork dishes.
Another thing I want to mention is, after I ate here, I had bad diarrhea the same night and the next day, so bad that I had to call off work and take a sick day off. Maybe my mouth can take the spiciness but my body certainly can’t. So look out if you think you can handle the spiciness.
Going to washroom won’t be a relax thing anymore for the next day if you have decided to visit this place.

Service is okay. Arriving one time in late evening hours there was only one guy who spoke very little English, and who was a little too quick to recommend kung pao chicken (and I think got my order wrong). Back for a second time things went smoothly.
Fiddlehead Stew: OK so they screwed up on this one and gave me something completely different (something involving string beans). Was looking forward to fiddleheads.
Cooked Eel in Spicy Sauce: Lots of bones, but very good and heavy use of Sichuan pepper.
Sweet Potato in Hot Toffee: Expensive but tasty
Authentic regional cuisine. 3.5÷5

The spicy chicken in the bamboo was all bits and pieces. As much bone pieces as there were peppers… Which was a lot.
Other food might be worth a try.

This is the restaurant of bits and pieces, and I have to say that I haven’t been so let down in a while. Maybe my expectations were simply too high based on the strength of the reviews here. Taste-​wise, they have the fragrant spices that I so love about good Northern Chinese cooking. The soup in the soup noodle was flavourful, the spices plentiful. We had the Dong Ting duck noodle and this steamed chicken in a bamboo thing that in menu pictures had looked so tantalizing and spicy. Both dishes ended up being made from the tiniest parts of the respective fowl. The chicken bits were mostly chopped up leg bones, so we were spitting out bone shards with almost every bite. It wasn’t that spicy either. The duck bits looked like there were the butt tips of several ducks — all nubbly fat globs with a shred of meat attached. We also had the seafood ‘bird’s nest’ (seafood presented in a fried noodle nest that I thought was average and overpriced.
As this place is relatively new in a not-​yet full new-​ish plaza, the restaurant was clean and bright with nice décor. However, with all the other great Chinese restaurants in the area, I wouldn’t come here again.

I been coming back to Konner Chinese Restaurant for dinners a couple of time, and both times I have good experiences and of course great Unilocaler dinner mates!
Now I realized that make Konner’s spiciness uniquely different is their spiciness is garlicky spicy… yes they are still hot and have a great kick but it is more than pure spicy. sometimes just being hot makes some dishes lost their character. and every thing just kind of taste the same!
Other dishes I tried:
Spicy winkles ($ 6.99)
— winkles kind of looks like little snails. Stirred fired in a black bean garlic chili sauce
— I was trying to suck them out. but really you do need to pick them out with toothpicks
Steamed Fish Head with Pepper ($ 15.99)
— If you like fish heads… there are a lot of gooey goodness inside the head. and be cool when your friends making sucking noises when they eating the fish eyes…
— Just look spicy with all the red chili. but quite savoury
Steamed Taro with Pepper ($ 8.99)
— A healthy option… maybe just too healthy…
— steaming the Taro does changed the texture, my fellow Unilocalers were not too impressed. but I have to give credit for the huge portion…
Dong Ting Duck Noodle ($ 6.99)
— Great savoury duck broth, surprising good tasting.
— Big portion good value!
Chicken in Hot Pot ($ 11.99)
— interesting presentation with the burner heating the hot pot
— chicken a little rubbery and dry and tasteless
Services here always surprising good. Waitresses speak limited English… Mandarin preferred. but with all the photos in the menu, you would not have problem ordering.

My on-​going hit-​list for Konner:
#94 Youlou sauteed preserved pork with bamboo shoots
Finally discovered what that «Smoky bamboo dish» was. Still good.
#89 Griddle cooked cabbage
Also, recently got a cabbage dish was awesome. It gets brought to your table with a hot-​plate to boil it, however, I like it better when it’s less-​cooked, so don’t wait to eat it. The crunchy texture of still-​raw cabbage is awesome.
#202 Deep fried pepper with preserved egg (cold dish)
Still tasty. Better shared with more than 2 people.
I’d have bumped to 5 stars, but I feel like they dialed down the heat in general, so they stay at 4.
(Check the blog for accompanying photos)

Snap Judgement: Good vibes and lively. Great place to share a meal with friends and family. Decent food.
The décor is modern with dark espresso finishes. A large sparkly crystal chandelier is the main focal point of the dinning area. At its maximum capacity, it is a tight squeeze especially when trying to get to the back of the restaurant, where the new and clean bathrooms are located.
— We decided to try Deep Fried Fermented Tofu. Because of the strong fetid aroma, this delicacy, especially for someone like me, was an acquired taste. [
— The steamed Fish Head with Chili Pepper was listed under Konner’s specialty. The large fish head arrived steaming hot, covered with bright fresh red chili and scallion. The mighty chili will make you think, «man, this is going to hurt.» But nope. It looked like some of the chili seeds had been omitted (?). Which, in my opinion, would have intensified the tasty broth even more. [
+ Chicken in the Pot had been prepared and simmered in spices. This pungent dish was presented in a mini cast iron pot, and hung over a small burner. Love the spicy sauce! The best part of this dish was the dark meat pieces, they were scrumptious. The white meat, on the other hand, was less than impressive. [
+ Dongting Duck Noodle Soup was delicious. The tiny pieces of duck meat was juicy and wasn’t gamy. The broth was flavorful with a hint of spices. I would love to see larger pieces of the succulent duck in this dish. [
I’m totally digging Northern Chinese cuisine. I love the hearty and robust style of cooking, as well as the use of zesty spices. Is Konner Chinese Restaurant THE place for Northern Chinese cuisine? I’ll have to go back, try other dishes and compare them to other Northern Chinese cuisine establishments. In the mean time, my search continues.

Konner specializes in Hunan cuisine, one of the eight great Chinese cuisines. Excellent, I thought as I had no clue what Hunan food was about but at time all I knew was that it wasn’t Szechuan. Little did I know that the distinction behind Hunan dishes is of it’s purely Hot Spicy rather than Szechuan’s complex Spicy. Hunan should also be fresher, oilier, and simpler.
There’s not much lobby space while we lined up in queue and synchronized with looking at the Menu and writing up our order until our table was ready for this Hot n’ Spicy crawl. Menu has lots of introduction for this cuisine along with great photos. I guess it’s inline with their motto of introducing Hunan cuisine to the Canadian community.
Fish Head w/​Pepper ($ 15.99/small) is a Fish Head steamed and topped with Chili Sauce and side dish of Noodles. It was A-​OK in general as Fish Heads go, however I felt that it was just slightly underdone as I sucked on the Head cavities. The Chili Sauce probably had some salt to give that savouriness and went GREAT with the Noodle (think Soba — Slurp!).
Hunan Fermented Stinky Tofu ($ 4.99/small) looks to be five-​spice variety Tofu as it was dark in appearance. It stank if you ZOOM close-​by and the texture was crispy exterior and light airy interior. Alright snack but not my favourite Stinky Tofu of the bunch.
Chicken in Pot ($ 11.99) was Snail and White Meat Chicken with Spicy Sauce/​Bell Peppers/​Onions. Imagine a small scale Cowboy style Chuckwagon Chili over the open fire, which is the style of presentation here. I didn’t like the bland White Chicken Meat as it was neither marinated or juicy. (–0.5 *Star)
Dong Ting Duck Noodle Soup ($ 6.99) was enough to feed a couple and it probably is an imagery of Dong Ting Lake in color. I didn’t like the boney Duck pieces as much but it was only a small aspect of this dish. The Rice Vermicelli was a good selection as it doesn’t get soggy while the Duck Broth was almost an equivalent of a Tonkotsu in depth which is probably why we thought over it. Obviously I won the battle!!! :P