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Dollar Meats has a fan base reaching
back to Hong Kong; they now ship product to the
U.S. and overseas.
Image credit: Shannon
Mendes |
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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