Top Chef Canada winner Chef Chanthy Yen at his Cambodian bistro Touk in downtown Vancouver on Thursday.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Clara Wong and her work pals were excited to try out the latest hot restaurant this week in Vancouver: Touk, a high-end Cambodian restaurant with offerings like borbor, rice porridge with bits of seafood and kampot pepper foam, and amok, halibut cheeks in kroeung custard, coconut normande and morning glory.
Dr. Wong, a fortysomething physician, is always on the alert for new ventures, particularly Asian ones, in the city’s constantly changing array.
“I feel lucky to have this amazing variety of options available to me,” said Dr. Wong, who said her group loved the experience in the art-filled, buzzy space located on Vancouver’s luxury retail street, Alberni.
Thousands of Vancouver diners like her and her friends have helped turn Vancouver into the country’s most restaurant-diverse city, according to a survey and blog post by the U.S.-based Escoffier School of Culinary Arts.
Vancouver beat out Toronto, Montreal, Markham, Ont., and even its own suburb of Richmond, which is a mecca of Chinese restaurants that’s been written up glowingly in The New York Times.
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Of Vancouver’s 2,446 restaurants, 1,161 or just over 47 per cent were judged as diverse in research that analyzed TripAdvisor data. The city “offers an impressive array of global cuisines within its relatively small city boundaries,” its report observed.
It’s a factor that encouraged Chanthy Yen to start his nouveau-Cambodian Touk.
“Vancouver is the goblet for a lot of diversity,” says Mr. Yen, who was brought up in Windsor, Ont., learned to cook from his Cambodian grandmother, trained at prestigious kitchens in Europe, was a chef for former prime minister Justin Trudeau and his family for a year, and is now here.
Over 47 per cent of Vancouver’s 2,446 restaurants were judged as diverse in research that analyzed TripAdvisor data.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
The Escoffier ranking is not a surprise to local documenters of the restaurant scene.
Lee Man, a food writer who is a long-time judge of the region’s Chinese restaurant awards, said Vancouver has come a long way from the days when the main alternative to European/American cuisine was dominated by Hong Kong chefs.
There’s been an explosion of other cuisines. Some are just the many regional varieties of Chinese: Szechuan, northern Chinese, Shanghainese, Hunan, Taiwanese, Singaporean. There’s the ubiquitous Japanese and Thai, popular in cities everywhere, of course. But there’s also Filipino, Vietnamese and South Asian in increasingly big numbers, along with regional varieties and micro-specialties of many regions − Malaysia, Peru, Palestinian − and Asian chains that are opening up branches in the city.
“Vancouver’s advantage is that there’s not a dominant market that has to please one palate. There are so many subsets of so many cultures,” Mr. Man said.
Because Vancouver restaurant goers are so willing to try anything, restaurants with specialized cuisines survive and even thrive by offering authentic dishes rather than some modified version geared to cautious North American palates.
Crab Hot Lau, a mini-Vietnamese chain that focuses on seafood dishes, has “a specific type of noodle with a particular type of chew,” Mr. Man has observed.
The stylishly decorated Karakoram restaurant, at the south end of a parade of diverse restaurants along several blocks of east-side Victoria Drive that includes Mexican, Ukrainian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Greek, specializes in traditional Pakistani dishes, especially karahi, dishes with lamb, chicken or goat cooked in a special pot with tomatoes, ginger, garlic and green chilis.
On south Granville, the shopping district next to the city’s wealthy Shaughnessy neighbourhood, a Yemeni restaurant called Saba is the dining standout of the street.
Elsewhere, Tamam has a loyal following for its very traditional Palestinian meals, while more than one Uyghur restaurant has opened up in recent years.
Besides just more geographic variety, a lot of the new restaurants are moving out of the category they occupied in many people’s minds previously: unambitious small places in the poorer parts of town.
They’re going high end.
“I do feel like Cambodian cuisine should not stay in the category of hole in the wall,” said Mr. Yen. Besides his upscale take, the city now has hip and contemporary versions of Vietnamese (Anh and Chi on Main), Thai (Maenam on Fourth Avenue), Syrian-Lebanese (Yasma in Coal Harbour), and Peruvian (Suyo on Main), among others.
Another local food writer, Fernando Medrano, attributes some of Vancouver’s rich kaleidoscope of cuisines to its Asian residents, who are enthusiastic experimenters.
“It’s our Asian eaters who are very open to trying out new places,” he said, while acknowledging that all Vancouverites are participants to some degree. “We just have a population of rabid eaters.”
Ian Tostenson, president of the B.C. Restaurant and Foodservices Association, has one more explanation for the rich food scene.
“Our industry has attracted a lot of immigrants and they are bringing their influences from their countries.”
He said the main growth in B.C. restaurants is among the smaller, specialty restaurants that focus on one niche cuisine – a certain type of ramen, for instance − and people go looking for that.
“We’re a very curious market.”
Special to The Globe and Mail