Fine China

From simple rice and noodle dishes to high-end seafood, Vancouver has some of the finest, most diverse Chinese food outside China itself. Here’s a guide to the city’s best shops and restaurants.

By Lee Man. Photographs by Shannon Mendes

MORE THAN ANY OTHER CITY, Vancouver and its local Asian cuisine have grown up together, and the variety and sophistication of Chinese culinary traditions available to Vancouver diners is virtually unmatched outside China. Not surprisingly, given the long history of Chinese food in Vancouver, traditional inspirations have found their way into some of the best dining rooms in the city.

The tasting bar at Lumière, for instance, serves up a ringingly clean and clear barbecue duck broth that would make a Chinese grandmother proud. Aurora Bistro’s decadent Five Spice doughnuts are all the more heartbreaking now that they only make guest appearances on the menu. For Aurora’s chef/owner Jeff Van Geest, Chinese ingredients like wood ear mushrooms provide textural possibilities not found in western ingredients. He points out that many local chefs grew up with Chinese influences, and those flavours and ingredients are just a natural part of their food vocabulary. Simplicity and respect for ingredients, hallmarks of good Chinese cooking, are consistent with modern western approaches.

In the late 1960s, my parents, worried that the turmoil in China would spill into Hong Kong, set out for a better life in Canada. My earliest memories of Vancouver’s Chinatown are of a few sleepy blocks populated mostly by old men. But it was here that Chinese from all over the Lower Mainland came to stock up on weekly provisions—Chinatown was the bustling center of culinary life.

As a child I learned to recognize freshness and immediacy in food. Local ingredients were front and center, and everything was made from scratch. Sunny weekends meant foraging expeditions for wild watercress, fishing for rock cod along Horseshoe Bay, or digging for geoduck clams out by Crescent Beach before sitting down to a home-cooked meal of steamed local seafood, stir-fried greens and roasted Fraser Valley duck.

Eating out usually meant simple foods; any Chinese kid who came of age during the 1970s would have capped a Chinatown expedition with a sustaining bowl of wonton noodles at Hon’s on Keefer Street. If you were lucky, chilled sweet red bean soup would be brought home for dessert. Andrew Wong of Wild Rice remembers that “formal restaurant dining was focussed on special occasions such as first month christenings, important birthdays for elders, wedding banquets and funeral wakes.” My own family was partial to celebrating at the long-gone New Diamond or Golden Crown in Chinatown, or the Flamingo on Fraser Street. Some of my fondest memories are of eating exotic braised Swatow food at the now-defunct Janus Restaurant with two or three tables of my unruly cousins.

EXPO 86 AND THE 1997 HANDOVER jitters put Vancouver firmly on Hong Kong’s immigration radar. Experienced restaurateurs arrived here eager to apply their entrepreneurial prowess to the city’s dining scene and demand for high-end Cantonese food, and the skill set to supply it, had arrived in Vancouver. Kirin Mandarin, Imperial Seafood and Victoria Seafood opened to booming business downtown. Shortly thereafter, Sun Sui Wah Seafood and Kirin Seafood expanded their operations and opened new rooms on Main and Cambie respectively. (The same family has been at the helm of Sun Sui Wah for over 30 years, while the Kirin Group is run by an experienced team who cut their teeth in Hong Kong. Tellingly, both restaurant groups have committed themselves to the Vancouver market rather than returning to Asia.)

The impact was immediate. Rooms were soon characterized by soaring interiors and impeccable service. Food quality trumped quantity, and portion sizes became more in tune with fine-dining establishments. The cooking became tighter and more focussed. Cantonese cuisine holds home cooking as the Platonic ideal—this concept was refined to a previously unimagined standard. Here was restaurant food that finally satisfied my parent’s exacting standards.

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