Mia Stainsby
Sun
Guests at Vogue Chinese Cuisine at 3779 Sexsmith in Richmond enjoy some of the unique dishes offered there. Photograph by : Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun
The Zest Japanese Cuisine restaurant brings a refined touch to the izakaya style of cooking. Photograph by : Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun
Victoria Tran and brother Dave Tran at their Mekong Vietnamese restaurant on Renfrew. They have another on Commercial Dr. Photograph by : Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun
The memories are still dust-free — remember chop suey and egg foo yung masquerading as Chinese food? Remember sukiyaki as the height of Japanese food? Lasagna hitting the outer limits of Italian?
Well, today’s lexicon of ethnic food would have been gibberish back then — ackee, aloo paratha, gulab jamun, bresaola, labneh, tajine, zarzuela, mu shu pork, bibimbop, mee krob, pho, chawan mushi or avgolemono, anyone?
The last 15 or so years has been the big-bang growth of ethnic cuisines, reflecting, of course, Vancouver’s melting pot culture. When it comes to Asian cuisines, nothing stands up to this city’s offerings except a flight across the Pacific.
Immersed in the city’s blizzard of ethnic cuisines, I’ve experienced a hailstorm of firsts — first Japanese oyakodon, Mexican pozole and hot chocolate, Italian baccala or Spanish merguez, Korean bibimbop, Indian paneer, Moroccan tagine and couscous, Chinese congee, Szechuan tan tan noodles, Vietnamese pho, or pad Thai — the dishes goes on and on and are so much a part of my expectations, they’re now regular fare, where once they might have been exotic. Indian food reached a new level in this city when Vikram Vij came along, refining the muddier, harsher aspects until it sang the Hallelujah chorus. Other cuisines will be doing the same and I can’t wait for the Vikram Vij of Vietnamese cuisine to come along. Or Greek, or Mexican, for that matter.
Banana Leaf Malaysian Restaurant recently opened a third location after 11 years in the city. Teresa Yu, administrative assistant, says she’s noticed the growing comfort level of diners with the intense flavours of Malaysian cuisine. “Dried shrimp paste is very aromatic with a strong smell,” she says, “and it’s probably strange for some, but they’re generally getting used to the intensities.”
As well, people are beginning to eat with a bit more lust than expected of polite and proper North American etiquette.
“Our Singapore chili crab is a whole crab that’s chopped up and mixed with sauce. It’s a little messy to eat but gradually, people have become more accepting of it. They used to be prim and proper about it but now they’re hands-on and adventurous. They put on a bib and get in there with the shell cracker and dive right in and enjoy it thoroughly.
It’s a whole visceral experience, using hands and mouth and crunching into it. It’s a full sensory experience and it requires letting go a little.”
The first wave of ethnic restaurants start at low-rent areas like Kingsway, Main, Commercial, East Hastings in Vancouver. In the suburbs, Coquitlam, Surrey and Richmond are home to innumerable Korean, Chinese, and Indian restaurants.
I’m noticing I go into withdrawal when I’m away from the city so I’m guessing somewhere along the line, the food here has become something more than the sum of its parts. Even in food-obsessed France, I was reaching a critical stage, craving Vancouver’s sparkle of flavours. It’s one reason I’m always happy to come home.
Some cuisines, like Italian and French, have become so deeply embedded, it’s no longer ethnic. While we haven’t quite covered the entire globe and probably never will, now and again, we’ve had offerings from unexpected corners of the world like Tibet, Peru and Myanmar. Food follows the migratory patterns of people, like it has for centuries; once settled, it finds its own expressions, liaising with other cuisines. The mainstream Joey’s restaurant chain, for instance, now boasts of its sushi taco. Some restaurants have conjoined cultures through unique personal histories — like the two Indian-Chinese restaurants, Green Lettuce and Chili Pepper House. Or Lion’s Den and Cameo Cafe, which are unions of Jamaican, Japanese and Cambodian flavours. Duffin’s Donuts makes nifty doughnuts, but their Mexican tortas, Chinese and Cambodian food tells you the story of the Cambodian-Canadian owners.
The major tectonic shifts have been with Chinese and Japanese food, going from chop suey and sukiyaki to a deeper, wider, truer representation of what those countries have to offer. From the Chinese, we’ve learned to eat communally and worship at the altar of freshness and take heat from the Szechuan side of things; from the Japanese, most significantly, we now eat raw fish with the greatest of ease and don’t think twice about seaweed or fermented soybean paste (miso) although we screech to a halt at some of the slimier textured Japanese food, like natto, another fermented soybean dish or mountain potatoes. And notice, we’ve become ace chopstick handlers, no longer the fumblers of yesteryear.
For Chinese food, I like the mom and pop kind of places where you feel like you’re walking into someone’s kitchen. My favourite of that ilk, WingWah recently closed, but if you happen to know your way around Richmond, it’s Chinese food bonanza out there. If I’m in the mood for a more refined meal, it would be at Sun Sui Wah. For noodles, there are endless variations at Toko, Shao Lin, Long Noodle House or Shanghai Bistro. Some Chinese dishes are still in the ‘exotic’ category for non-natives — dishes like jellied pork blood and chicken feet. Who knows, give us another five years. For those who just want to dip their toes, there’s nouvelle Chinese, like Wild Rice with Chinese food dressed in North American finery.
Where Japanese food was once teriyaki, tempura and teppan yaki, it bolted to sushi-ville where it rested for a good long period. Passions cooled a notch or two when sushi joints popped up like Orville Redenbacher popcorn, spreading right through the suburbs and into the hinterland. Lately, there’s been a mass march to izakaya style cooking, which originally tested West Coast waters in the early ’90s at Raku Kushiyaki where I gobbled up yummy grilled onigiri and miso-grilled eggplant; izakaya broke loose when a Japanese company spawned three, one on Thurlow (Raku), another on Robson (Guu) and yet another in Gastown (Kitanoya Guu). Now they’re they’re popping up like corn with Hapa Izakaya, the current gold standard.
“This city’s been so exposed to Asian cuisine that it’s not far-fetched for people to try salty squid guts [shio kara],” says Hapa owner Justin Ault. “It’s horrific and I despise it myself. The Japanese love it with sake and here, once in a while, people will order it because they want to try it.”
Ault’s menu even has horsemeat, very common in Japan. “It’s like eating Fido here but people are always asking for new things.”
When Japanese chefs visit Vancouver, they’re shocked at the number of sushi places in the city. What they don’t realize is, in Vancouver, sushi is not elevated to an art. Most sushi chefs here have not gone the route of many in Japan, where they’re not allowed to handle a sushi knife for years. “They quickly realize there’s only a few places operated by Japanese and some sushi chefs have not much more than two weeks of training.”
The proliferation of sushi and sashimi has paved the way for ceviche, which Baru, a Latin American restaurant in Point Grey serves a lot of now. “It used to be a hard sell because it’s not cooked,” says Mark Fremont, a co-chef. “Now, the the shrimp and halibut ceviche is one of our biggest sellers. In fact, the owners are looking into possibly opening a ceviche bar at some point. “We’ve been open five and a half years, we don’t advertise and we’re getting busier and busier,” he says. Customers are 80 per cent non-Latin American.
Along with Chinese and Japanese restaurants, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian places abound. Globetrotting around culinary Vancouver, you’ll find tastes of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Mongolia, Lebanon, Turkey, Vietnam, Russia, Eastern Europe, England, Germany, Switzerland, Venezuela, Ecuador, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Morocco, Ukraine, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan, Korea, Israel, Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia, Ireland, Myanmar, Hungary.
Do we hear any takers from Samoa? Iceland? Tunesia? New Guinea? Latvia?
© The Vancouver Sun 2006