SAY WHO?
Uncover layers of flavour and history at Salli Pateman’s new Chinatown hub Sai Woo.
Salli Pateman was once an adoring fan of Robert DeNiro until the actor sicced his lawyer on her. She named her first restaurant after him, calling it DeNiro’s Supper Club. She kept a special chair in the kitchen reserved for him, should he ever pay a visit.
Well, the incident ended her DeNiro worship and begat a renamed Section (3) restaurant for the section in the B.C. Privacy Act DeNiro threw at her.
“Funny, when I changed the name, sales went up,” she says. “I figured I should have countersued him for the years of lesser sales.”
After 18 years running Section (3), Pateman sold it a couple of years ago (to the Romer’s Burger people) and began plotting her next move. She had been eyeing Chinatown for some time and when she found an obscure Craigslist listing for a space, she sprang into action.
It was previously run by New Town Bakery and needed a total gut and structural work, she says. Traces of the previous tenant are evident by the “Best buns in town” slogan on the window.
After stripping back layers of history, she found another seven feet beyond the ceiling, a covered skylight and beautiful brick behind the wall.
They found enough of the original Douglas fir floor laid down in the 1920s to make it their own.
Pateman named the restaurant after the original restaurant by the same name (means West Lake). The historical Sai Woo Chop Suey House is mentioned in the story of the Hughes Gang murder of Yoshi Uno in 1942, as told by Stewart Muir in The Vancouver Sun in a six-part series in 2013. Gang members, it is said, went to the Chinese restaurant after the killing.
Today, Sai Woo is a long drink of fabulous space. The lighting by Lukas Peet (gigantic floating ‘buttons’) is striking. Moreover and more importantly, the food lives up to the room. It’s chic and delicious Chinese food with some renegade dishes reflecting chef Douglas Chang’s Chinese-withCaribbean-roots background.
Chang has worked in one of North America’s finest kitchens — New York’s Eleven Madison Park (fourth on the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants) — as garde manager (hors de’oeuvres, charcuterie, salads) and entremetier (soups, vegetables) and had stints at West, Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel and Bambudda on Vancouver.
His teaming with Pateman was kismet. Chang had coveted the space before Pateman called him; he had thought in his dream of all dreams, that would be the space he’d want for a restaurant. Now, he’s part owner.
He puts heart and soul into the place, working from early morning to late at night. Lunch and brunch menus have been held back until there’s better staffing.
I loved his food for the clean, vibrant flavours. Sharing dishes range from $5 to, well, $94. The latter is for a 45-day dry-aged rib-eye for four people, so really, it’s $23.50 dish.
Some dishes are Chinese comfort foods, elevated. The dinerstyle fried rice is light with fluffed out grains mixed with egg, preserved olives and greens. Cola chicken wings, a Hong Kong dish, is marinated in Coca-Cola, soy and stock and roasted.
Pea agnolotti and herb salad in junhua ham broth demonstrates Italian-Chinese fusion can work very well. Tea-smoked tuna and tuna confit — both delicious — share a plate with a teamarbled boiled egg and a wild greens salad with miso vinaigrette. That topped the chart as my favourite dish — or maybe not. Maybe it’s the hanger steak, beautifully cooked to a melting, medium rare and served with bitter melon, sautéed vegetables and black bean jus.
Baked sablefish with lotus root, bamboo shoots, radish and burdock sit in a light kombu/burdock broth. Even a simple gai lan dish with oyster sauce sparkles.
For dessert, his steamed molasses rum cake is ethereally light because it’s steamed. Almond tofu with ginger syrup and toasted almonds is a generous and healthy dessert, helped along by torn shiso leaves.
There were a couple of dishes that don’t warrant somersaulting over. The crisped rice with cured egg yolks and nori almost had me, but it was overly chewy; a vegetarian sausage with a charred eggplant sauce, crispy tofu and chili oil is a riff on Chinese thin-sliced sausage rolled round toasted shrimp roe, but it lacked depth of flavour.
Justin Anello’s cocktails are nods to the neighbourhood; he sources herbs and teas from Chinatown markets to embellish drinks like Sai Woo Sour and Smoking Gun (which does emit smoke).
The wine list is compact with mid-range wines, but if anyone wishes, there’s a reserve list for the asking.