Just got back from a weekend in Scarborough.

Yes, as in “Toronto suburb.” You may well wonder why I wanted to spend a day there, since I have no relatives or acquaintances in that neighborhood.

Actually it’s quite simple. I was talking to a friend of mine about my last visit to Toronto and how I liked Chinatown. “Then you have to go to Scarborough,” she replied. “Excellent shopping.”

As it turned out, she was right. There are two adjacent malls on Steeles Avenue — Market Square and Pacific Mall — that remind me a lot of the monster malls of Richmond, B.C., in that they transplanted Chinatown to a suburban setting. You get all the restaurants and housewares without having to hunt for parking.

You can get some nice deals there. At Market Square, I wound up picking up a “fuzzy logic” rice cooker for $170, taxes included. The same model was advertised on the net for $199, not including shipping and taxes. The saleslady was extremely considerate, opening the packing box and making sure nothing was broken, and including some pointed information about warranties. Would that all sales people would be this considerate.

I also liked their ideas of a food court. I found their ideas of Chinese and Japanese food a lot more palatable than what you get at Manchu Wok or the Teriyaki chain mall stores. More authentic recipes, I suppose.

Pacific Mall is also the first place that I saw dried shark’s fin. I’ve eaten shark’s fin soup before, and I always wondered about it. Then I saw the pricing they had for the real thing. I don’t think I’ll be making shark’s fin soup anytime soon.

About the only drawback I found to Pacific Mall is the smell. For some reason, there’s a section of the mall that continually smells like someone was getting a heavy perm. But apart from that there’s something relaxing about wandering around a Chinatown mall without worrying about car traffic.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be back.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 18:47 and is filed under Explorations, The Urban Possum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.