Blue Chopstix

Blue Chopstix is the Guelph kitchen you bring the table that cannot agree on dinner. One person wants Chilli Chicken in a tangy garlic-and-green-chilli sauce; another is set on a Thai green curry; the vegetarian is covered by paneer butter masala and a plate of vegetable momos; someone else just wants a Hyderabadi chicken dum biryani, which the menu sends out with a free pop. The kitchen runs Hakka Chinese, Thai, and Indo-Chinese comfort food off a single menu without treating any of it as a sideline, and the meat throughout is halal, hand-cut, and sourced from Sargent Farms. It is family owned, tucked into a Silvercreek Parkway plaza on the west side of the city, and built less around one signature dish than around the breadth that lets a group order wide.

The appetizer list is where the Indo-Chinese instinct shows clearest. Lollipop Chicken — French-cut wings fried crisp and boldly seasoned — comes scaled from four pieces up to twelve. Chicken momos arrive in fried preparations that run tandoori, Szechuan, chilli, or sweet-and-sour; near them sit fish pakora, samosa chaat, Indo-Chinese fried corn, bullet chicken, deep-fried tiger prawns by the eleven-piece order, and fried chicken wontons by the twenty. Vegetarians are not an afterthought here — paneer 65, spicy paneer, and deep-fried spicy cauliflower all hold their own among the fried starters.