Rise Eatery takes chances and succeeds, mostly
To dream is to fuel a life. But sometimes dreams are just dreams, unrequited.
Dan Leung heeded practicality and headed into electronics forsaking a career cooking. He had worked in restaurants while going to school, including frantic shifts at the Elbow Room (the breakfast café where the gay owner and staff hurled insults at guests, including celebrities like Sharon Stone). He loved it. He’d loved cooking ever since he was a kid, cooking with his grandmother.
After giving electronics a good shot, he made a break for it and went to culinary school and opened Danz Catering 15 years ago, which he ran with wife Wanda Lai, serving corporate clients and running a small café. Another practical decision.
It seems he loved to eat. Lai remembers a client asking her not to be offended but needed to know if the chef was skinny or fat. “The last time we hired a caterer, it was a skinny chef and we ran out of food for our guests,” the client worried. Don’t worry, Lai reassured. “He’s fat. He’s 240 pounds and he loves to feed people.”
Today, Leung is a born-again foodie. In June, he went for the dream and opened The Rise on South Granville. He’s since lost excess weight and he’s not worried about putting on pounds with his 15- to 16-hour work days. The restaurant is like a giant StairMaster with a downstairs kitchen. “I joke with our servers and tell them they get a free gym membership with the job,” says Leung.
“We realized his strength is in blending flavours. He’s very creative and doesn’t want to do anything traditional,” says Lai. “It’s a global inspired menu and he pulls ingredients from different parts of the world. People told us it might not seem focused but we feel very strongly about this. We feel Vancouver’s ready to open their minds and palates and have fun. We don’t claim to be authentic about anything. It’s our take on dishes.”
Having checked out their food on their Instagram account, I was intrigued and eager to try it. Dishes are meant to be shared and price points are in the ‘teens’ with only a five-ounce grilled sirloin with chimichurri jumping the $20 mark.
My meal proved to have hits and misses with some fusion confusion going on. We opted for a patio seat (could use some embellishments) and started with the Routine, a mash-up of poutine and ramen. Instant ramen noodles are cut into cubes (frozen first so it doesn’t disintegrate) and deep-fried; it replaces the fries in poutine. Cheese curds, miso gravy, bonito flakes top the fried ramen cubes. I’m just not into you, I said to the hard bites of ramen which scraped my palate. It’s a popular dish but for me it was an epic fail. But I noted two women at another table finished theirs up.
Next, duck liver brûlé was an improvement on ‘normal’ duck liver pates. The brûlé top (torched and candied sugar) adds a crunch to an otherwise uniformly soft experience.
Salted rice malt chicken thighs (shio koji) are grilled and skewered; it was tender and juicy although not bursting with flavour. The chicken is free range, from Maple Hills. The accompanying potato salad had a lot going on and way too many sweet pickles on the side.
The grilled sirloin I mentioned earlier (triple A) was sliced and topped with a great green and garlicky chimichurri and Kennebec fries which were too limp — understandably so, since it was tossed with a pepper, onion and tomato stir fry. The kicker, pieces of Chinese doughnut were tossed in there too. Leung says it’s a take
on Peru’s beloved Chinese take on beef stir fry, often served with fries — lomo saltado. I had that dish in Lima not long ago and liked its simplicity. At The Rise, it’s deconstructed with the beef on the side and the french fries the star of the dish. Leung says customers tell him the fries are the star of the dish but to me, the beef was the best part.
Heart Attack Rice, fried in chicken schmaltz is great because it’s not overwrought with global influences. There’s chicken confit, a soft boiled egg and chicken crackling and they all played nicely together. We couldn’t finish this and I looked forward to heating it up for an eccentric breakfast but alas, they forgot to pack it and we forgot to remind them.
Dessert was a matcha lava cake with sweetened azuki beans and azuki bean ice cream. The azuki bean part was good but the matcha lava cake didn’t compare to its chocolate counterpart. Uncooked chocolate batter is one thing but uncooked matcha flavoured batter is another.
I did see dishes going by I’d like to have tried — like the Lo Hay salad, built vertically with smoked salmon, cucumber, daikon, carrot, pickled ginger, onions, tomatoes, taro potato, crisp rice vermicelli, sesame and peanuts with apricot and beet vinaigrette based on a traditional Chinese New Year dish. Lo hay means toss it and the fish symbolizes luck and prosperity.
I could see Leung has got cookery skills down pat but he needs to rein in his pent-up excitement over his new-found creative freedom.