A Menu for Everyone

Good Buddy Restaurant

Owner: Andy (Hue Jian) Lin
Location: 2059 111 Street NW, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6J 4V9
Phone: 780-432-6050
Offers: Online ordering; coupons.
Cuisine: Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong Style, and Canadian Chinese Cuisine
Year of establishment: 1999
Website: http://www.goodbuddy.ca

Especially in Edmonton – a city renowned for a Chinatown district bursting with first rate eateries – one would not expect to find one of the best and most versatile restaurants offering Chinese cuisine to be located on the periphery of town, in one of the city’s newest suburbs.

But this is just one of the many pleasant surprises that adventurous diners encounter on discovery of Andy Lin’s Good Buddy Restaurant.

Located on the south end of Edmonton in a suburban mall close to the major shopping complex South Edmonton Common, Good Buddy arrived on the scene in 1999 – just the right time to serve a massive new suburban audience for Chinese dining and takeout.

“This development was still quite new when the restaurant opened,” Andy explains. “It was a perfect opportunity to grow with a new part of Edmonton.”
 
But Mr. Lin’s intelligent decision to stake out a new part of town is certainly not the only reason for Good Buddy’s success.

Rather than offering seasonal or holiday discounts, Good Buddy has found tremendous success using online coupons. For example, the restaurant’s current online special is a free order of noodles, fried rice, or chow mein (at the diner’s discretion) with any order over forty dollars.

And not only is it possible to find savings online, it is possible to place one’s entire order through Good Buddy’s website – a rarity in the Edmonton marketplace. “We’ve heard from our customers that they really appreciate the convenience of our online ordering,” Mr. Lin explains.

It’s precisely this attentiveness to customers’ needs that is at the very core of Mr. Lin’s philosophy, and Good Buddy’s success. According to Mr. Lin, “Customer service comes first. We concentrate on giving diners an exceptional experience in every respect, not on how much money it’s possible to make from them.”

As you would expect, then, the dining, kitchen and restroom areas are all immaculate, and service is consistently quick and efficient, even when (as frequently occurs), Good Buddy gets very busy. The number of staff on hand varies from 10 on regular lunchtime, up to 22 on busy evening.

Mr. Lin’s relationship with his staff members is friendly and open. Besides instilling first-rate customer service as a core value, Andy has trains each person to be responsible and to make decisions on their own, when he's not there.

All of Good Buddy’s chefs hail from China, where they learned their style of cooking. Having been taken on Good Buddy, they have received training inside the restaurant, to ensure the consistently superb standard the restaurant is known for, across an unusually diverse menu thoughtfully designed to serve a wide variety of palates.

“There are three separate menus,” Mr. Lin proudly shares. “One is traditional Chinese, one is in more of a contemporary Hong Kong style, and one offers Canadian style Chinese food.” By having these three distinct options, Mr. Lin is confident that there is truly something on the menu for everyone. The character of Good Buddy’s food varies according to the menu, since Good Buddy strives to give diners the flavors they expect from each type of cuisine.

The restaurant’s most popular western-style dishes are lemon chicken and ginger beef. Deep fried crispy chicken is also quite popular. Yet Good Buddy offers healthier alternatives also, in the form of vegetarian meals, and also many options prepared without MSG, instead using FDA recommended alternatives.

While many dishes share a common method of preparation – stir fry – this preparation style serves a wide variety of ingredients, from live seafood (crab, lobster, tilapia, clam, and shrimp) to chicken, pork, and beef. A trademark shared by dishes across all three menus – present, too, whether we are witnessing the lowliest entree or the most exotic seafood platter – is the thoughtful plating of each and every serving. It is as if true artists are at work, not only serving some of the best gustatory interpretations of dishes one might find at other restaurants, but also the most visually appealing.

This visual appeal lies not only on the plate, however, but is characteristic of the restaurant’s premises in general. Bright without being blinding, subtle pot incandescent pot lighting falls on opulent dark oak tables decorated with simple place mats and elegant artificial flowers. The light cream colored walls are anchored by plush green carpeting throughout the premises. A mix of traditional Chinese and Western landscape art provides decoration, mirroring Good Buddy’s culinary adoption of the best of many traditions. The music the restaurant plays, too, is a thoughtful fusion, offering contemporary and western classical in Asian arrangements.

Good Buddy is managed directly by Mr. Lin, who is on hand at the restaurant most days. Andy (Hue Jian) Lin came to Canada in 1995. Before this, he had taken courses in China on how to work in the food industry, and manage restaurants. In the three years before opening Good Buddy, he worked at several other restaurants in Edmonton, to get practical experience.

This experience obviously served Mr. Lin well, as Good Buddy is so successful he is considering expanding the restaurant’s current size if more space becomes available on either side of his current location, or even opening a second location elsewhere in Edmonton.

Good Buddy has an opinion box near the exit. Unsurprisingly given the restaurant’s strong customer focus, this opinion box is usually filled with praise for individual servers, and for what is frequently called “best Chinese food in Edmonton!”

But then, it’s not always possible to satisfy every customer: there was the time Good Buddy got a suggestion in the comment box, presumably from a young gentleman aged ten or so, that the decorating would be better “if you get live snakes and scorpions loose on the floor under the tables!” Fortunately for the scores of other patrons, this is one customer suggestion Mr. Lin has not yet acted on.