[URBAN NOTE] Sunny Dragon, 519 Bloor Street West

[rfmcdonald]

Sunny Dragon (519 Bloor Street West), located squarely in the heart of The Annex, was built in the shell of an abandoned McDonald's. Although I noticed when I entered the doors early this evening that the owners did a good job of refurbishing the place, they still kept the classic faux-wood floor tiles. Sunny Dragon is notable mainly for being the first Korean-style Chinese restaurant I've seen, its name apparently repeated in hangul script and in Traditional Chinese characters. Perhaps the restaurant is associated with Korea's Chinese minority, long subject to discrimination in the South as Kyung-Tae Park's working paper "Discriminating Invisible Minorities: The Experience of Ethnic Chinese in Korea" outlines, perhaps not. That's one of the mysteries I meditated over as I ate my noodles in stir-fried black bean sauce with beef, that and the mysteries of a South Korean television show played on the ubiquitous monitors, some sort of a competition between a mixed-gender crowd of teenagers who danced to American hip-hop before going on to joust with giant pompoms on sticks while apparently mocking each other. The noodles were good, mind.