Restaurant Awards 2025: Chef of the Year, Angus An

We ask so much of our chefs and offer so little in return. We expect them to be all-consumed, eschewing personal relationships in favour of working 18 hours a day with a pair of giant tweezers in their hand. And, in return, if they’re lucky, we might go to their restaurant, maybe we’ll leave a good review and maybe we won’t complain that the rib eye—whose astronomical cost increase we’ve seen firsthand at our own local grocery store—was way too expensive. Forget about RRSPs, forget about RESPs (if they can find time for a family)—a chef is an artist, goddamn it. Suffer.

It’s a paradigm Angus An knows all too well. As a young chef full of piss and artisanal vinegar, he took his life savings and his impressive CV and opened a place that would make Carmy proud. Gastropod did everything right: oodles of passion, inspired cooking, multiple sets of tweezers. He worked those maniacally long days, ordered the finest ingredients possible without paying attention to something so mundane as cost, wowed the critics. And the public? Well, they weren’t quite there yet. So, on the verge of financial ruin, An did something that great chefs aren’t supposed to do. He changed course. He drew up a new concept that would be called Maenam and in doing so created that elusive unicorn: the sustainable business that mixes enthusiasm and practicality without sacrificing results for the customer.

It’s been over 15 years since that hard decision and An is a different, frankly better, chef than he was in the heady days of Gastropod. Eighteen-hour days have been replaced by time home from the restaurant to cook dinner for his son, Aidan. While many chefs peacock with their Michelin stars, An’s heart fills with pride not when he talks about the bevy of critical accolades but instead when he notes that, of his 70-plus staff, a full third have been with him for over three years and half for over five. It has allowed him to reach that goal of ultimate consistency, so that things don’t go off the rails if he’s away from the kitchen. It has also allowed this noted perfectionist to cautiously expand his business: first it was Longtail Kitchen in New West, then Fat Mao in Chinatown, then Sen Pad Thai on Granville Island, then another Fat Mao downtown.

When Vanmag chats with An, he’s standing in the empty shell of his new project—Sainam on Davie Street—and even though a planned quick and easy reno has turned into a months-long, incredibly costly delay thanks to a morass of city red tape, An is now at the point where taking things in stride has become a superpower.

Fireworks? They can be fun, but if you’re looking for outbursts in the kitchen, thrown pots or cancelled service, then you’ve come to the wrong place. As it turns out, top-level dishes don’t require all those histrionics. Maenam’s smoked lingcod with white gati curry, Fat Mao’s braised duck noodles—the quality of the food coming out of the kitchen is spectacular. We take for granted that we just happen to have one of the finest Thai restaurants in the world going on about its business on West 4th.

The reality is that there are few people more passionate than An: about cooking, but also about being a dad; about ingredients, but also about running a sustainable business; about his recipes, but also about the people who help him execute them. It all adds up to a supremely modern interpretation of what it means to be our 2025 Chef of the Year.

Maenam
1938 W 4th Ave.
maenam.ca

Longtail Kitchen
116–810 Quayside Dr. New Westminster
longtailkitchen.com

Fat Mao Noodles
Multiple locations
fatmaonoodles.com

Sen Pad Thai
1689 Johnston St.
senpadthai.com

Find more of the best Vancouver restaurants on our list of 2025 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Award winners.