There’s something special brewing at a small strip mall located next to a gas station on Merivale Road and Anna Avenue.

Two chefs took a chance on this space around four months ago and opened vastly different restaurants. But both share one thing in common: they serve excellent, authentic dishes from their homelands to hungry clients who visit from places as far away as Kingston and Montreal.

We made two trips to Takumi BBQ this month. Both felt like a pilgrimage; we went to pay respect to this regional cuisine from China, new to us, that has rapidly become one of our favourites.

Amanda opened this restaurant with her chef to dish out authentic dishes from Dongbei, a region in northeastern China that shares a culinary heritage with neighbouring Mongolia, Russia and the Korean peninsula.

To the uninitiated, the the weather here can be quite cold and the growing season quite short, so it’s much more common to find preserved vegetables, seafood and lots of barbecues in the summertime.

To those of you who have already visited a Korean barbecue restaurant, Takumi BBQ will feel very familiar, albeit with Chinese motifs, decorations and complimentary barley tea instead of the nokcha rice tea more commonly served in Korean restaurants.

We ordered the da la pi, or potato noodles in sesame sauce. I was recently introduced to cold noodles. They’re perfect for those hot days where you want something to cool you down. The simple noodle dish is one of the most popular served at Takumi BBQ, with the tangy sauce, thin strips of cucumber and sprinkling of cilantro combining to form a refreshing flavour that serves as an excellent appetizer, or as a main course dish on its own.

During our second trip, we ordered the marinated lamb shoulder, served with chilli sauce, kimchi, sweet and sour sesame and a finely ground powder of cumin and nuts. We ordered a size of zucchini to grill and Chinese pancakes to make little wraps.

The thinly sliced strips of lamb—made with tender cuts of sheep meat—were divine, even on their own. But when wrapped into the little pancakes, the flavour elevated. The grilled zucchini provided a perfect crunch to the juicy lamb.

No flavour was out of place.

When it came time to leave, Amanda told us our total for the barbecue visit came to around $35. We paid and told her we’d back for another pilgrimage.

We’re new disciples of Chinese barbecue after all.