AT FORTUNE’S GATE
Lido restaurant, serving Hong Kong-style cuisine in Richmond.
Asia has found its way to Richmond, B.C., making it a one-stop paradise for food from the other side of the Pacific,
On a steamy Friday evening, early last summer, I exited a Korean-made metro train with a crowd of teenagers and parents with young kids, who filled the elevated platform at Bridgeport Road with a congenial babble of Cantonese, English, Tagalog and Mandarin. Crossing an expansive parking lot, we entered a makeshift village of canopied stalls, set amid a forest of simulated cherry trees whose LED blossoms lent the turquoise twilight a pinkish hue.
Vendors barked out pitches for Pikachu plushies, fidget spinners with strobing lobes and cosplay anime onesies for adults. On a small midway, the roar of an animatronic brachiosaurus was briefly overwhelmed by the jets of a Boeing 787 bound for one of the megacities of mainland China. The unmistakable odour of octopus and squid grilling over charcoal permeated the air.
It could have been the Temple Street market in Kowloon, Hong Kong, or one of Singapore’s open-air hawker centres. But I was on the North American side of the Pacific Ocean, in a city the Chinese have dubbed Fu Gwai Moon (Fortune’s Gate). Richmond, British Columbia, as it is more commonly known, is a suburb built on flat islands embraced by arms of the Fraser River that lead into the Salish Sea. When I was growing up in neighbouring Vancouver, friends considered it a netherland of cranberry farms and split-level ranch-style homes and dismissed it as “Ditchmond” after the often-fetid drainage canals that lined its numbered thoroughfares. Back then, Richmond’s chief attraction for me was the international airport on Sea Island, where I’d pedal my10-speed and imagine I was aboard one of the jetliners rising over the mud flats to the wider world.
Since I left B.C. 20 years ago, the world — Asia, in particular — has found its way to Richmond: Almost two-thirds of the city’s 200,000 residents are now of Asian background. (Its popularity among Asians is sometimes attributed to the auspiciousness of the Cantonese translation of its name.) On No. 5 Rd., locally known as the Highway to Heaven, the golden dome of a sprawling Sikh gurdwara and the stupa of the first traditional Tibetan monastery in the Pacific Northwest rise among blueberry stands. The newcomers are largely Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese. The mainlanders have brought with them controversy: The free-spending fuerdai, or “wealthy second generation,” have been blamed for the stratospheric rise in the region’s real estate prices.
But their presence also means Richmond has become a onestop paradise for lovers of Asian food. These days, when I’m hankering for a plate of Hainan chicken rice, xiao long bao (soup dumplings) from Shanghai, or an oyster omelette sautéed Chiuchow style, I know I can find it in Richmond. Richmond Night Market As my first stop, I had chosen the Richmond Night Market, whose stalls take over a patch of former industrial land on a bend in the river on weekend nights from May to October. Fernando Medrano, a food blogger who came to Richmond with his parents from the Philippines in 1976, had volunteered to be my guide. Admission is $4.25, free for children under10 and adults 60 and over and prices at the stalls range from $5 to $12.
“The Night Market is where people in Richmond go to eat after they have dinner,” Medrano said. “It used to be the place where teenagers came to buy counterfeit Vuitton bags and bootleg DVDs. It’s evolved into a place where parents bring their kids, and you can sample every kind of Asian cuisine.”
We threaded our way past the knick-knack vendors to the market’s main attraction: dozens of tightly serried food stalls, offering everything from Malaysian rotis to a sugar-powdered Japanese raindrop cakes made of translucent agar that wobbled like an edible breast implant. Medrano steered me away from such culinary oddities as stinky tofu, dragon’s beard candy and the curry rotato (a deep-fried potato, spiralled around a stick and sprinkled with spice).
Instead, we stopped at Ohana Poke Bar for a bowl of misomarinated poke — technically a Hawaiian dish, but piled high with a Pan-Asian mix of chunks of sustainably-sourced ahi tuna, kimchi cucumbers and taro root chips, and assembled by Benedict Lim, a Filipino chef. (Ohana will not be participating in this year’s Night Market.)
Medrano insisted we brave the long lineup at Chef James Xin Jiang Man BBQ, where James Chen, who works as a chef at Vancouver’s high-end Fairmont Waterfront Hotel during the day, was rearranging skewers of chicken, beef and lamb kidney between bursts of flame from a smoke-shrouded grill.
For Medrano, Richmond is the place where venerable Asian cooking techniques meet some of the New World’s best ingredients.
“People often say the Chinese food you get here is superior to what you get in China, where everyone is concerned about pollution,” he said. “A lot of Richmond is still protected farmland, which means there’s great bok choy, gai lan — all the Chinese greens.” He added that being near the Pacific Ocean provides access to some of the freshest seafood in the world. Parklane I was eager to see what Richmond’s Chinese chefs, working at brick-and-mortar restaurants, would make of such seafood. That evening I sat down with Stephanie Yuen, a Hong Kong-born freelance food writer and cookbook author, at Parklane, a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of coastal Guangdong.
“In British Columbia,” said Yuen, as a waiter brought a green-shelled Dungeness crab with bound claws to our table to inspect, “the Chinese were the first to put live crabs in a tank, the first to insist on fresh, live seafood.” Twenty-five minutes later, the crab returned to our table, red-clawed and succulent after being stewed in a broth of cinnamon, ginger and cloves.
At Yuen’s invitation, Michael Zhou Jing, the executive chef, joined us at our table for a glass of Okanagan Valley white wine, as we exclaimed over the delicate flesh of our main course, a pound-and-a-half rock cod, steamed live in supreme stock and topped with cilantro and shredded scallion whites.
A veteran of the Pink Pearl, Vancouver’s pioneer of uncompromising Hong Kong-style Cantonese dining, Zhou now cooks in the Chiuchow tradition, where the emphasis is put on letting fish and vegetables express their natural flavours through poaching, steaming and light stir-frying. Kirin For some, like food writer Lee Man, those ingredients result in Chinese food that is so good it’s in a category of its own. Man, a founder of Canada’s Chinese Restaurant Awards, whose top spots are regularly swept by chefs from Richmond, had invited me for a morning tour of his favourite addresses.
I probably wouldn’t have found our first stop on my own. Kirin is carved out of a single level of a multi-story parking garage. The abrupt transition from oil-stained concrete to plushly upholstered dim-sum palace felt like climbing down a manhole into Ali Baba’s cavern.
“Richmond has the best Chinese food outside of greater China — full stop,” Man said as Kirin’s attentive staff placed a succession of dumplings around a complimentary plate of housemade XO sauce, chewy with dried fish and shrimp. Golden Paramount Our next stop, Golden Paramount, was a different kind of dim-sum experience. Beneath a tattered awning in a nondescript strip mall on Park Rd., we entered a parlorlike room with a dozen or so tables. Families were bent over round tables, intent on their wontons and steamed buns; a grandmotherly woman next to us played mahjongg on her smartphone.
“For a lot of Chinese diners, Golden Paramount is a kind of platonic ideal,” Man said while surveying the room. “It’s a small, well-formed room. It’s not about flash, about showing off by having king crab or shark’s fin. It’s about simple food, well made.”
As our order arrived — the best dim sum in Richmond is not served via carts, but rather “hotel style,” plate by plate, in the Hong Kong tradition — I understood what he meant. We shared air-dried oysters, lightly deep-fried in a premium soy sauce, topped with sautéed greens, and perfectly done spring rolls whose sole stuffing was fresh-cut daikon. For the har gow, a dumpling that is the measure of any dim-sum restaurant, Man awarded Golden Paramount high marks. A bite pierced the translucent wheattapioca wrapper, yielding a burst of plump, sweet prawn. HK B.B.Q. Master Man insisted we make one last stop. Veering off No. 3 Rd., he pulled his BMW into a cityblock-size chain superstore. To my surprise, its parking lot was edged by hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The biggest line was outside HK B.B.Q. Master, where Man ordered a small plastic foam box heaped with char suy — slow-cooked barbecue pork.
“Sik fan,” he said, as we joined a knot of diners who, like us, couldn’t wait to get back to their cars to dig in. (“Let’s eat” is the no-nonsense Cantonese version of bon appétit.) Under light tooth pressure, the crispy skin parted to give way to surpassingly tender, salty meat. O’Tray Noodles And I discovered a new pilgrimage spot for future layovers at Vancouver International. Just before my flight left, I squeezed in one last ride on the Canada Line, this one to Aberdeen station. Riding an escalator to the mezzanine of President Plaza, I was hypnotized by the performance of the chef behind the counter of the tiny O’Tray Noodles. After pouring batter onto a circular griddle, he cracked and distributed two eggs over the setting crepe. With a few deft moves of his hands, he dotted it with a fiery chile sauce and scallions, filled it with broken pieces of phyllo-thin fried dough, folded it into a rectangle and, with a broad smile, handed it to me in a plastic basket.
Voilà: a perfectly formed jianbing, the savory crepe that is the street food of the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. Soft yet crispy, spicy yet soothing, and entirely typical of the Richmond eating experience — in a fluorescent-lit food court overlooking a mall parking lot, a stomach-pleasing miracle of authenticity.