Comfort food in the financial district
Roasted Peking duck with crispy onions memorable
Not that we’ve had a terrible falling out or anything, but I’m done with burgers and fries, my occasional guilty pleasure. Now I get the same messy, get-your-hands-dirty pleasure from Asian rice bowl foods, doubling my pleasure and feeling less guilty.
Perhaps it all began with Korean bibimbop. I love those bowls of rice topped with a colourful array of kimchee, nicely marinated slices of beef, veggies, spicy gochujang sauce and fried egg.
Then Le Tigre food truck’s Kick Ass Rice bowl sent me over the moon. It’s got really tasty rice (with sake, ginger, garlic and dashi going on) topped with pork belly, poached egg and herbs. You quickly learn to shovel the food into your head with chopsticks, you just can’t help it. At home, I make up my own bowl foods mixing up a “green rice” with garlic scape pesto or chermoula or chimichurri and toppers like leftover marinated meats and of course, a runny poached egg for more sauce.
But I like Asian flavours with the rice. Now I have another go-to for a rainy day rice bowl food fix — Heritage Asian Eatery, in the city’s financial district.
This is chef Felix Zhou’s first foray into ownership, partnering with Natasha Romero (who coowns The Anchor Eatery in West Van) and Paul Zhang. Until now
he’s been into fine cooking, apprenticing at West under David Hawksworth and Warren Geraghty; he moved on to Shangri-La Hotel then worked in London for two-Michelin star chef Simon Rogan. Back in Vancouver, I loved his refined and clean-tasting food at The Parker and Big Trouble, a tiny restaurant in Chinatown.
So how does Zhou package all that experience into Asian comfort food with a price point that mostly shimmies under $12?
He starts with an idea of what he’d like to eat, incorporating some of the smooth moves he’s acquired over the years.
And good call going into the financial district — this is like the Asian version of meat and bread with lineups out the door as office workers pour out of towers — a simple concept, heightened with great ingredients and yummy detailing. Counter service, minimalist decor and unpretentious tableware help keep prices down.
One thing Zhou won’t sacrifice for affordable food are quality ingredients, and he puts a lot of love and time into his food. Toppers for his lunch and dinner rice bowls are crazy-making — like roasted Peking duck with crispy onions, slow-cooked marinated egg, watercress, pickled daikon, carrots and Peking duck sauce (delicious, and the quality shines); a pork belly bowl with yuzu slaw, crispy onions, kimchee daikon and slow- cooked egg.
As well as the rice bowls, Zhou has four bao — Asian sandwiches in steamed buns with fillings bursting with flavour (all $7).
Here, he outsources the steamed buns to a business that can do it better and has more kitchen space. The buns are very soft and airy and, he says, it doesn’t have a lot of flavour interfering with the layers of flavours in the fillings. I tried a house-made cotechino bao and a shiitake bao, both bright with flavour. You’ll need a couple of them to fill you up.
There are some smaller offerings like salads, vegetables, chicken wings and beef tataki with finely calibrated flavourings.
I tried the five-spice chicken wings ($5 for four of them) — Zhou marinates them for up to five days in a garlic, ginger soy sauce, then coats them in cornstarch and five spice, steams them and finally, they go to the oven for a crispy skin.
And there’s breakfast, but don’t expect bacon and eggs or scones and muffins. There are breakfast bowls and crepes here, but the bowls are not bowl food — they’re like very distant cousins to eggs bennies, and not even served in a bowl. Rice patties (made by pressing flavoured sushi rice in hotel pans, chilling, cutting and frying) stand in for English muffins and have toppings like mushroom ragout and two sous vide eggs, or braised pork belly with wood ear mushrooms and sous vide eggs ($10 to $12).
The crepes aren’t really crepes, either. They’re like the steamed pancakes that come with Peking duck, they wrap around an omelette and inside he tucks things like pork jowl and satay sauce ($6).
Heritage Asian Eatery is busiest at lunch, so prepare to line up unless you can sneak out of the office early. They do take-away, and will take phone orders.