One of Scarborough’s best Caribbean–Indian restaurants, Super Hakka, has been a local favourite for variations on Hakka food.

Loosely defined, “Hakka” cuisine has roots in Chinese cooking, particularly linking to the Hakka ethnic group of southern mainland China. With migration and trade, the cooking of the Hakka people has made its way across the globe, today showing influence from Burma to the Caribbean, India to Puerto Rico. The Hakka cuisine we find here is largely representative of the migration of Hakka people from India to Toronto.

As a result, Indian Hakka dishes are hot and spicy and layered with sauces.

Super Hakka’s menu focuses on the Indian and Caribbean interpretations of Hakka food. There’s a healthy flock of students and workers that visit during the day for the cheap lunch options (from $5.95). At night, families cosy up in the restaurant’s private booths to get their hands on a half a dozen or so plates of sauced meats and rices.

Here’s our guide to ordering.

Snacks
The ideal way to dive into Hakka food is to start with a few snacks. Best enjoyed with a cold beer to cut the fiery chilies, you’ll want a plate of fish or chicken pakoras to kick things off. These fried fritters are loaded with spice and have a bouncy, chewy texture. They come served with homemade spicy sauce meant for dipping. The deep-fried tiger prawns are another worthy app, cooked shell-on with a thin crust of spice that adds heat to the sweet shrimp meat. Other notable bites include the spicy lollipop chicken and the deep-fried calamari.

Mains
Almost everyone orders chili chicken — and for good reason. “Dry or wet?” the waiter will inquire. The Indo-Chinese dish is made by tossing boneless pieces of chicken meat with a variety of house spices, soy, ginger, garlic paste and lemon juice. When ordered dry, the spicing is prevalent on your taste buds and it looks like large pieces of popcorn fried chicken. Wet, the chicken is tossed in a sweet and spicy sauce that’s great for mixing with rice. If the heat scares you, order the Manchurian chicken, a tamer version of the dish, with pronounced garlic and soy flavours. Have any room left? Try the seafood Hakka noodles: shrimp and squid are wok-tossed with a medley of vegetables, soy sauce and spices.

Super Hakka, 1801 Lawrence Ave. E., 416-755-0855