📍Jumbo Lobster Restaurant – 9019 Leslie St, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4A3
🌍Country: China  
🔥Must-try dish: Dum Sum
🪑Seating: Indoor seating only. 
👍The High: Lobster seasoned with Chinese spices is amazing! 
👎The Low: You need a full table to order the dim sum, so round up your friends, or risk missing out.

Just north of the city, Richmond Hill feels like stepping into one of the GTA’s most vibrant Chinese-Canadian hubs. The neighbourhood is packed with bustling Chinese grocery stores, restaurants, and specialty shops, with signs often written in Mandarin, Cantonese, or both. It’s lively, immersive, and unapologetically authentic, the kind of place where you might feel delightfully out of your element if you don’t speak the language.

Jumbo Lobster Restaurant earns its name in more ways than one. Order from the dim sum menu and you’ll see towering plates of lobster paraded through the room, landing on tables with a bit of spectacle. The space itself is equally over the top: grand, bustling, and impossible to ignore. Walking inside feels like entering a lavish, high-energy food hall, with Peking duck hanging in the windows, walls lined with pricey wine bottles, and a constant hum of servers weaving through crowds who are clearly here to order everything.

Skipping the dim sum isn’t really an option. It’s a fully coursed, seemingly never-ending feast, with dish after dish arriving and circling the table on a massive lazy Susan, meant to be shared among ten or so people. Go in hungry, because the steady stream of plates just keeps coming, and that’s very much the point. It also helps to dine with someone who knows Chinese table etiquette: when to spin the lazy Susan, how to use the serving chopsticks, and why it’s important to keep the teapot constantly topped up. It’s an art. 

Now for the food. There’s a full page menu that allows you to pick your favourite plates divided by stemmed dishes, deep-fried dishes, rice rolls, specialty dishes, and desserts. These all come before the main event – the lobsters. 

Here are some highlights from the menu: 

• Shrimp dumplings: This speaks for itself. It’s the glossy wrapped shrimp dumpling that we all know and love. 
• Shu mai: A personal favourite, this dense ball packed with pork and shrimp never disappoints. But the quality can vary, and this one is a ten out ten.  
• Beef ball: Picture a meatball with Chinese seasoning. Can’t go wrong. 
• Chicken congee: This soup with oatmeal substance can get a bad reputation, but I’ve never met a bad one. There’s usually a protein like chicken or fish and seasoning, and it brings about a feeling of comfort and safety to a dinner table. 
• Fried rice: Always a show-stopper, the fried rice came in abundance and went quickly. 
• Noodles: There are several noodle dishes to pick from that range in spice levels and ingredients mixed to suit any palate.

There were a few tempting dishes we skipped this time but are already bookmarking for a future visit: chicken feet, pork spare ribs in black bean sauce, and a chive-and-shrimp rice roll that looked especially enticing as it floated by. It’s simply impossible to taste everything in one sitting, which makes a return visit feel less like a choice and more like a given.

The grand finale, though, is impossible to miss: enormous platters of chopped lobster, served in two different seasonings. It’s the most hands-on moment of an already immersive meal, gloves go on, sleeves get rolled up, and everyone digs through the shells to extract every last bite of meat. A lively debate broke out at the table over the “right” way to eat lobster. The Canadians held firm to the classic warm-butter approach, while most of the Chinese and Indian diners happily leaned into bold chili, ginger, and garlic-spiced shells. As for me? I’m firmly team both. When lobster’s on the table, I’m not here to choose, I’m just here to eat.

Eat with you soon!