Among the many charms of Vancouver: it's spectacular seaside location, snow capped emerald mountains, gentle climate and friendly locals, there is one unique aspect that is often overlooked. In Vancouver, the food is so good, that people are now traveling from their home countries to eat their traditional foods thousands of miles from home.
Take Vij's, for example. New York Times food writer, Mark Bittman, wrote about the place that it is, "easily among the finest Indian restaurants in the world." Traditional Indian curries are built around familiar spices – turmeric, cardamom, coriander – and improved upon with the introduction of local ingredients: ruby trout, sablefish, wild mushrooms. Among the line-ups that are a perpetual component of the restaurant, it is not uncommon to find travelers visiting from Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta who have come thousands of kilometers to eat better versions of what they might get back home.
While it might be a stretch to say that Tojo's is better than any sushi restaurant in Japan (Tokyo boasts more Michelin dining stars than any city in the world, after all) there's no question that chef Hidekazu Tojo's inspired take on traditional Japanese food is masterful. This is the restaurant that invented the ubiquitous California Roll, for goodness' sake! In Japan you won't find much smoked salmon on sushi menus, but at Tojo's the local delicacy is rolled up with Atlantic lobster for a Canadian east meets west treat. Albacore tuna is seared tataki style and served with ponzu sauce while BC salmon skin replaces anago (eel) in the "Great BC Roll."
What Tojo has done for Japanese food in Vancouver, chef Angus An is doing for Thai at his restaurant, Maenam. In a sleek, modern room, guests devour local spot prawns wrapped in Betel leaf, crispy fried oysters are dipped in a spicy nahm jim sauce and the freshest halibut is poached in a complex green curry sauce. Even in Thailand few places manage to blend sour, salty, bitter and sweet with such precision.
A few kilometres south of the city is Richmond, a city in its own right, but also a bedroom community of Vancouver. Far from a boring, sleepy suburb, Richmond just happens to be home to some of the best Chinese food in the world.
A couple of factors conspire to make Richmond such a great food city. More than sixty per cent of its 200,000 residents are immigrants, among the highest rate of any major city in Canada, and the majority of that population is from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. By happy coincidence, many of the most prized delicacies in Chinese cuisine are at their best in the waters surrounding Richmond. That explains the particularly intense, saline sweetness of the blanched geoduck at Red Star Restaurant and the briny freshness of the oven roasted oysters with port wine at Big Chef Restaurant. B.C. Dungeness crab is rarely better than when sautéed with mushrooms and premium soy at Jade Seafood restaurant and, although it sounds cruel, the steamed live sablefish at Sea Harbour House is utterly civilized.
As good as those places are, there are plenty more to be discovered. Alexandra road alone has 200 restaurants. The food courts inside nearly every mall are teeming with Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Malaysian places and this year there will be two full-blown night markets aiming to outdo each other with the finest global street food. Getting familiar with all the great food in Richmond is a daunting task, but a delicious one.
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