Calgary’s Open Sesame – When I can cook better than the chef

I recently wrote a great review of the Japanese restaurant Globefish at Kensington. Just so you know I don’t do good reviews only, and to warn you from making the same mistake as my friend and I did, here is my review of Calgary’s Open Sesame based on the experience my friend and I had last night.

*******

Open Sesame – When I can cook better than the chef

The place looks hip and buzzing with customers. Our server was really cute and charming. Too bad the food sucks based on how the three dishes we ordered off the menu tasted like. :(

IMHO, most restaurants in Calgary China town offers much better prepared food than Open Sesame. The crispy stir fry noodles were not crispy on the edges (actually quite oily and soggy). The flat wide rice noodles looked like they were chopped/cooked into hundreds of pieces (they should be whole and looked like a flat white ribbon). And the salt and pepper calamari was probably one of the worst prepared S&P calamari I had tasted in some time, where some of the batter in a few of the pieces weren’t even cooked through.

If you view lunches/dinners as social gatherings, and don’t really care about the food, then Open Sesame may be an OK choice.

If you care about how the food actually taste, then I think there are much better offerings almost anywhere else.

I will give it a 1 out of 5.

P.S. Open Sesame is owned by the same owner that operates Smugglers’ Inn. I wrote a short paragraph on how I eventually gave up on Smugglers’ Inn in this blog posting a while back.