There’s no great, street-spanning, pagoda-like arch heralding the entry to Richmond, British Columbia. Then again, nobody visits this part of Metro Vancouver for the architecture. In Richmond, the Asian food capital of the Western Hemisphere, the cuisine — often more authentic than what can be found in the actual Far East — is king.
Many blocks present 360 degrees of possibility. Restaurants — thousands of them — reflect Richmond’s whopping Asian immigrant population and represent the entirety of Asian cuisine and its subsets. It’s hard to know where to go, let alone figure out which specialties to order on menus with so many options each dish has a number.
A fixer is essential; mine comes in the form of Montgomery “Monty” Lau. A Hong Kong native, the 14-year Richmond resident and executive sous chef at The Apron, Lau, 29, has me at ‘wonton.’ He gets the night off from his boss, Hamid Salimian, who thinks showing me around is such a good idea that he joins Monty’s tour.
“Who’s running the show at your restaurant tonight?” I ask when we met.
“You don’t want to know,” jokes Salimian.
The duo maintains both a chumminess and reverence for each other, freely joking while referring to each other as ‘chef’ all night long.
We pile into Salimian’s decade-old BMW and hop out a mile later for the evening on Alexandra Road. Lau’s tour will never span further than a few blocks up and down this street, yet no one will complain. We begin at McNoodle House, the North-American outpost of a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong. Despite the no-frills cafeteria vibe, it has nothing to do with the Golden Arches around the corner.
“It’s not service. No gimmicks. It’s just food,” says Lau. “This place does noodles, congee and clay pot and that’s it.”
Get McNoodle’s noodles. The Cantonese style has a pleasing bite as opposed to the softer style enjoyed by those Lau dubs “the people from the north.”
Three bowls arrive, two wonton and dumpling noodle soups with thick noodles (#1 on the menu) and one shrimp and pork dumpling noodle with thin noodles (#9). The waitress turns to me, the restaurant’s only obvious outsider, asking “You want fork?” while Lau pulls a bowl beneath his chin, lowers his head, plunges his chopsticks in and noisily inhales his noodles.
I’m in good hands.
While Cantonese tastes (and the restaurants that cater to them) are shifting toward bigger portions and cheaper food, McNoodle sticks to its Hong Kong guns. They use traditional foods like pork bones, dried shrimp roe and dried flatfish to give the broth a divine, fish sauce-y depth while the wontons and their dimply dumpling cousins, shui gao — both filled with shrimp and pork — are sweet, salty and delicate hidden treasures beneath the noodles.
Lau orders clay pot rice with two kinds Chinese sausage, dried pork and duck leg on rice (#87), which arrive with dark soy — a nutty, less salty and slightly sweet version of the original.
“This is old school — it takes a whole 20 minutes to cook,” said Lau, who explains that the idea is that everything cooks together. The vapor from the cooking rice rehydrate the meats; their juices flavoring the dish. “In some ways, this is more authentic than what you could still find in Hong Kong.”
A column of steam floats up to the ceiling when Salimian lifts the lid. Inside, the rice ranges from the coveted popcorn-like texture along the bottom to float-away light, just inside the top edge. Sweet, dense and rich, the meats lend beguiling complexity to the dish.
We head down the street, crammed with restaurant-filled strip malls snaking in and out, and I wonder aloud how tourists know where to go. Salimian squelches a laugh and Lau explains a Mafia-like family network locals use to help eliminate some of the trial and error required to discover the specialty or two at each restaurant.
“There are places I look at and I just can’t imagine going inside,” says Salimian on some of the spots that are now his favorites.
“At places like McNoodle, prices are low and volume is high, so people can go out more — it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on,” explains Lau. “I can go out for dim sum at least once a week.”
Next, we go up a flight of stairs for upscale Cantonese at Jade Seafood. It’s a fast-moving, fish-in-tank, waiters-in-bowties-and-vests kind of place, packed with families sitting around large round tables.
“I pre-ordered a crab for us,” says Lau, “but first, we’re trying the geoduck with egg white.”
I bow to Lau as our waiter removes our chopsticks from their sleeves. What arrives could also be called “geoduck, two kinds of silky goodness” — deep fried nuggets from inside the giant bivalve’s shell have a deep-sea sweetness while the strips of neck are seared and succulent. The egg whites, which likely skittered across the wok in a microsecond, are cloud-like. Topped with tiny, bright orange roe, the dish is a slippery, sexy study in sweetness.
The maître d’ appears at our table wearing industrial-strength black rubber gloves and plucks out a great, live Dungeness crab from the Pacific Northwest, and holds it up for our inspection. Moments later, the crustacean reappears in a modern dish, fried then wok-sautéed with a salted egg yolk glaze, creating a beautiful yin and yang between the rich, salty glaze outside the shell and the delicate, sweet flesh within.
At 9:15 p.m., an unseen hand clears out the giant dining room and we follow the crowd out, backtracking west on Alexandra Road while following the culinary map north to Korea.
Jang Mo Jib has a late-night beer hall feeling and tea is served from a plastic pitcher. Here, we run into our first real tripping point of the night. The seafood pancake (S5) and short ribs (B1) both elicit non-responses from our crew, but in the meantime, the gam ja tahng pork bone stew (J3) has been bubbling away on a portable gas cooker at the end of the table. The meat, and there’s plenty of it despite the misleading name, is buttery, fall-off-the-bone goodness in a deeply-flavored broth that’s full of smoke and spice. It’s also fantastic with a cheap Cass lager, something that helps get in full sync with the locale.
We roll out the door, trying to convince ourselves that it wouldn’t be wasteful to try a bite or two in the nearby Manzo, a spot favored by post-shift chefs for its robata (Japanese barbecue), sushi, beer and sake (“They throw down for sure,” says Salimian. “Beer and meat on a stick — what more could you want?”). But it’s Monday and on Monday, thank god, Manzo is closed.
The boys counsel me on what to see at the upcoming night market and bid me farewell before Salimian’s taillights get lost amid the strip mall neon.
Guideless a few days later, I find the wildly popular night market hidden among Richmond’s big-box stores. First noticed by either the towering plume of smoke that rises from its grills or the heavenly aroma they create, the market is a state-fair-style throng magnet populated by every age group, every walk of life.
Sharpen thy elbows. Whether it’s for octopus takoyaki, giant turkey drumsticks or spiral cut, five-spiced and skewered-down-the-middle “hurricane” potatoes and yams, the crowds line up where the food is best. The market is a street-food junkie’s Asian-themed dream.
My favorites are the barbecued squid and the lamb skewers from A Fan Ti, a family-run grill with Muslim cuisine from China’s Xinjiang region. The squid is sweet and spicy, screaming for a beer, and the lamb skewers, cooked in a flash on a molten-hot iron grill, are served in a paper bag with the skewer sticks poking out from the top. They’re drenched with herbs and served as spicy as you can take it.
On my last night in town, I head back to Manzo which, along with being a magnet for local chefs, turns out to be a hideout for Richmond’s hipster crowd (who knew?). They come seeking grilled items, everything from chicken wings to beef tongue on skewers to whole fish, along with spot-on sushi, sake and great jugs of Asahi beer.
Dinner is definitely a hit-and-miss affair (the notable whiff being almost-frozen Kobe beef sashimi), but chicken-skin skewers are like crackling for the Japanese bar-food set. The grilled tripe has fantastic depth of flavor and the whole-grilled baby mackerel, patiently dissected with chopsticks by my waitress, hits moments of soy and daikon (radish) perfection.
As I’m about to leave, I spy a fan note on the wall reading, “Manzo has the best oysters ever!” It was from a woman who may have downed four dozen in one sitting. I promptly order two Shigokus, which are served on ice with marinated, shredded radishes, a chiffonade of green onion and a dash of ponzu sauce, the whole thing is a goodbye kiss with a flavor so clear, I realize that the best use for the lemon on the edge of the bowl is to clean my hands.
Many blocks present 360 degrees of possibility. Restaurants — thousands of them — reflect Richmond’s whopping Asian immigrant population and represent the entirety of Asian cuisine and its subsets. It’s hard to know where to go, let alone figure out which specialties to order on menus with so many options each dish has a number.
A fixer is essential; mine comes in the form of Montgomery “Monty” Lau. A Hong Kong native, the 14-year Richmond resident and executive sous chef at The Apron, Lau, 29, has me at ‘wonton.’ He gets the night off from his boss, Hamid Salimian, who thinks showing me around is such a good idea that he joins Monty’s tour.
“Who’s running the show at your restaurant tonight?” I ask when we met.
“You don’t want to know,” jokes Salimian.
The duo maintains both a chumminess and reverence for each other, freely joking while referring to each other as ‘chef’ all night long.
We pile into Salimian’s decade-old BMW and hop out a mile later for the evening on Alexandra Road. Lau’s tour will never span further than a few blocks up and down this street, yet no one will complain. We begin at McNoodle House, the North-American outpost of a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong. Despite the no-frills cafeteria vibe, it has nothing to do with the Golden Arches around the corner.
“It’s not service. No gimmicks. It’s just food,” says Lau. “This place does noodles, congee and clay pot and that’s it.”
Get McNoodle’s noodles. The Cantonese style has a pleasing bite as opposed to the softer style enjoyed by those Lau dubs “the people from the north.”
Three bowls arrive, two wonton and dumpling noodle soups with thick noodles (#1 on the menu) and one shrimp and pork dumpling noodle with thin noodles (#9). The waitress turns to me, the restaurant’s only obvious outsider, asking “You want fork?” while Lau pulls a bowl beneath his chin, lowers his head, plunges his chopsticks in and noisily inhales his noodles.
I’m in good hands.
While Cantonese tastes (and the restaurants that cater to them) are shifting toward bigger portions and cheaper food, McNoodle sticks to its Hong Kong guns. They use traditional foods like pork bones, dried shrimp roe and dried flatfish to give the broth a divine, fish sauce-y depth while the wontons and their dimply dumpling cousins, shui gao — both filled with shrimp and pork — are sweet, salty and delicate hidden treasures beneath the noodles.
Lau orders clay pot rice with two kinds Chinese sausage, dried pork and duck leg on rice (#87), which arrive with dark soy — a nutty, less salty and slightly sweet version of the original.
“This is old school — it takes a whole 20 minutes to cook,” said Lau, who explains that the idea is that everything cooks together. The vapor from the cooking rice rehydrate the meats; their juices flavoring the dish. “In some ways, this is more authentic than what you could still find in Hong Kong.”
A column of steam floats up to the ceiling when Salimian lifts the lid. Inside, the rice ranges from the coveted popcorn-like texture along the bottom to float-away light, just inside the top edge. Sweet, dense and rich, the meats lend beguiling complexity to the dish.
We head down the street, crammed with restaurant-filled strip malls snaking in and out, and I wonder aloud how tourists know where to go. Salimian squelches a laugh and Lau explains a Mafia-like family network locals use to help eliminate some of the trial and error required to discover the specialty or two at each restaurant.
“There are places I look at and I just can’t imagine going inside,” says Salimian on some of the spots that are now his favorites.
“At places like McNoodle, prices are low and volume is high, so people can go out more — it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on,” explains Lau. “I can go out for dim sum at least once a week.”
Next, we go up a flight of stairs for upscale Cantonese at Jade Seafood. It’s a fast-moving, fish-in-tank, waiters-in-bowties-and-vests kind of place, packed with families sitting around large round tables.
“I pre-ordered a crab for us,” says Lau, “but first, we’re trying the geoduck with egg white.”
I bow to Lau as our waiter removes our chopsticks from their sleeves. What arrives could also be called “geoduck, two kinds of silky goodness” — deep fried nuggets from inside the giant bivalve’s shell have a deep-sea sweetness while the strips of neck are seared and succulent. The egg whites, which likely skittered across the wok in a microsecond, are cloud-like. Topped with tiny, bright orange roe, the dish is a slippery, sexy study in sweetness.
The maître d’ appears at our table wearing industrial-strength black rubber gloves and plucks out a great, live Dungeness crab from the Pacific Northwest, and holds it up for our inspection. Moments later, the crustacean reappears in a modern dish, fried then wok-sautéed with a salted egg yolk glaze, creating a beautiful yin and yang between the rich, salty glaze outside the shell and the delicate, sweet flesh within.
At 9:15 p.m., an unseen hand clears out the giant dining room and we follow the crowd out, backtracking west on Alexandra Road while following the culinary map north to Korea.
Jang Mo Jib has a late-night beer hall feeling and tea is served from a plastic pitcher. Here, we run into our first real tripping point of the night. The seafood pancake (S5) and short ribs (B1) both elicit non-responses from our crew, but in the meantime, the gam ja tahng pork bone stew (J3) has been bubbling away on a portable gas cooker at the end of the table. The meat, and there’s plenty of it despite the misleading name, is buttery, fall-off-the-bone goodness in a deeply-flavored broth that’s full of smoke and spice. It’s also fantastic with a cheap Cass lager, something that helps get in full sync with the locale.
We roll out the door, trying to convince ourselves that it wouldn’t be wasteful to try a bite or two in the nearby Manzo, a spot favored by post-shift chefs for its robata (Japanese barbecue), sushi, beer and sake (“They throw down for sure,” says Salimian. “Beer and meat on a stick — what more could you want?”). But it’s Monday and on Monday, thank god, Manzo is closed.
The boys counsel me on what to see at the upcoming night market and bid me farewell before Salimian’s taillights get lost amid the strip mall neon.
Guideless a few days later, I find the wildly popular night market hidden among Richmond’s big-box stores. First noticed by either the towering plume of smoke that rises from its grills or the heavenly aroma they create, the market is a state-fair-style throng magnet populated by every age group, every walk of life.
Sharpen thy elbows. Whether it’s for octopus takoyaki, giant turkey drumsticks or spiral cut, five-spiced and skewered-down-the-middle “hurricane” potatoes and yams, the crowds line up where the food is best. The market is a street-food junkie’s Asian-themed dream.
My favorites are the barbecued squid and the lamb skewers from A Fan Ti, a family-run grill with Muslim cuisine from China’s Xinjiang region. The squid is sweet and spicy, screaming for a beer, and the lamb skewers, cooked in a flash on a molten-hot iron grill, are served in a paper bag with the skewer sticks poking out from the top. They’re drenched with herbs and served as spicy as you can take it.
On my last night in town, I head back to Manzo which, along with being a magnet for local chefs, turns out to be a hideout for Richmond’s hipster crowd (who knew?). They come seeking grilled items, everything from chicken wings to beef tongue on skewers to whole fish, along with spot-on sushi, sake and great jugs of Asahi beer.
Dinner is definitely a hit-and-miss affair (the notable whiff being almost-frozen Kobe beef sashimi), but chicken-skin skewers are like crackling for the Japanese bar-food set. The grilled tripe has fantastic depth of flavor and the whole-grilled baby mackerel, patiently dissected with chopsticks by my waitress, hits moments of soy and daikon (radish) perfection.
As I’m about to leave, I spy a fan note on the wall reading, “Manzo has the best oysters ever!” It was from a woman who may have downed four dozen in one sitting. I promptly order two Shigokus, which are served on ice with marinated, shredded radishes, a chiffonade of green onion and a dash of ponzu sauce, the whole thing is a goodbye kiss with a flavor so clear, I realize that the best use for the lemon on the edge of the bowl is to clean my hands.
