Location: 1475 W Broadway, Vancouver, Canada
Telephone number: +(1) 604 736 6868
Website: None
Date of visit: 29 & 31 October 2009
Approximate cost per head: from C$ 30
Comments on wine list/beer: Reasonable, nothing special
Summary:
This “northern China” restaurant has been around for nearly 30 years. It has changed hands several times. The most recent being 2 years ago when the chef bought out the (then) owner.
In the UK, there is practically no pure “northern China” or Shanghai style restaurant. Most Chinese restaurants offer a mixture of “southern China” style cooking with a couple of northern dishes thrown in e.g. Peking Duck and hot and sour soup. By the way, if you are in China, they usually serve Peking Duck as 3 courses, the crispy skin with pancakes and hoisin or sweet yellow bean sauce, the meat is shredded and stirred fried with vegetables and then the soup – made from the carcass. Crispy Duck in this country is a “western bastardisation” of the Chinese version..
Shanghai style is more oily than its southern counterpart and have different ingredients – the noodles are thicker like soba and fresh water prawns, eels and various carp dishes are typical “upmarket” dishes of the region. In terms of dumplings, soup dumplings are a shanghainese concoction. Salt and pepper dishes also originated from this region.
For the first meal (lunch), we had chilli beef noodle soup, soup dumplings and two types of scallion cakes – leek and chilli beef. They were all good. However, the scallion cakes are now soft – similar to short crust pastry and not the hard, deep fried doughy version that I remembered. The whole meal came to less than $30 for 2.
For the evening meal, we had chilli tripe – yes, you guessed it, chilli and/or garlic is heavily used in a lot of dishes, salt and pepper pork chops, scallops with seasonal vegetables (pak choi and carrots) and “dry” bean curd. The whole lot came to $60 for 2. Everything was good except the “dry” bean curd which was too dry.
There is no equivalent of this type of cuisine in the UK at present. In fact over the last 40 years, only one had appeared in Gerrard St and it lasted less than 24 months.
Leave a Comment