This Canadian City Has 80 Restaurants on One Road—and Some of the Best Chinese Food Outside Asia

The long curtains of the banquet room had been thrown open to the morning, and every object—tea service, silver filigree on chopstick handles—glinted like treasure. When it opened in 1999, Sea Harbour Restaurant was a dim sum palace for the newer wave of mainland Chinese who wanted to celebrate their prosperity, and who were willing to pay accordingly. Today, men in black suits still work the fast-filling room, taking orders to the soft tinkle of piano music.

Soon the har gao arrived–traditional Cantonese shrimp dumplings that are a quintessential yardstick by which to measure the proficiency of a dim sum chef. These were extraordinary, the shrimp steamed until the meat, lightly perfumed with ginger, snapped under the tooth, and the pleated wrapper held the right amount of chew. My friend Tan Vinh and I jousted with chopsticks over the last dumpling and agreed that Sea Harbour was the finest dim sum we'd had our entire trip—which means it was likely the best dim sum on the continent.

I wasn't in Toronto, nor in Flushing, Queens—places that boast to having the best Chinese food in North America. I was in Richmond, British Columbia, a place travelers may know (if they know it at all) as Vancouver's southern neighbor. After a long weekend of sampling dim sum, Hong Kong barbecue, slippery egg and sauerkraut fish, I departed more convinced than ever that Richmond is home to the best Chinese food you can get without buying a plane ticket across the Pacific.

How did this happen? In the mid-1980s, the United Kingdom announced that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese rule in 1997. Spurred by the looming handover, and by financial incentives, about 225,000 Hong Kong residents moved to Canada before the handover. Later, another wave of immigrants from mainland China came over. Many made a home in Richmond; today about half of the city's 230,000 residents are of Chinese descent, the highest proportion of any city in Canada. It's possible to walk around downtown for hours and only hear Mandarin and Cantonese spoken. And the city supports some 400 restaurants, most serving cuisines from China.

Last spring, I drove three hours north to Richmond from my home in Washington state with Tan, a Seattle Times food critic who loves Richmond's authentic tastes. We had limited days, and too many options. We needed a Virgil to guide us. Luckily, Tan had met just the person in his previous forays: Lee Man. Lee arrived in Vancouver from Hong Kong with his parents when he was three months-old.

Today, in addition to his non-foodie day job, Lee is the founding judge of the Chinese Restaurant Awards and writes about food. Lee particularly loves how food is history on a plate, and how eating here tells a lot about changing changing China—and how China has changed Canada.

A heads-up about dining in Richmond: downtown, where most of the eating happens, is a zoning-gone-wild mash of strip malls and parking lots. Don't be deterred. I ate the best mochi of my life from Car's Dessert while sitting on a bench beside a four-lane highway, as planes on final approach from Beijing bellied overhead.

One evening Tan and I headed with Lee to Bamboo Grove, a longtime Richmond restaurant with a well-curated Old World wine list, but whose exterior is so unassuming that one might mistake it for a speakeasy. Lee conferred with David Jue, the owner and an old-school front-of-the house man with a million-watt smile who's originally from Hong Kong. A parade of platters arrived: chitterlings soup with gingko nuts and white pepper; local water spinach with funky fermented tofu and shrimp paste; eggplant and tiger prawns with ground pork, prepared in the style "fish fragrant."

Everything was new to me. Eating in Richmond challenges a diner from elsewhere, in the best way, with novel textures and flavors, Lee told me. So many Chinese moved here that chefs had—and still do have—a ready clientele, so they don't have to dumb down their food. "It's not going to be big, easy flavors," he said.

Next, elevated above the others on a raised platter, arrived a dish that shifted my consciousness. Any other day, geoduck would be on my must-avoid list. It's the world's largest burrowing clam, and it's a punchline in the Pacific Northwest for the way it overspills its shell–sometimes three feet long–like a cartoonish phallus. But geoduck is also an Asian delicacy, and the chef at Bamboo Grove knew how to prepare it, blanching the mollusk briefly, then slicing it into papery coins before tossing them in "slippery eggs," or long, wet curds.

"Geoduck is the dish in Richmond you gotta order," Tan told me. "You won't find many seafood palaces, or many James Beard-winning chefs back in the States, who lavish his much attention on it." Months later, I still daydream about it—the subtlety, and the texture. There were other meals, less famous but no less flavorful, that stick with me, like duck and fatty pork belly over rice at HK BBQ Masters, and hand-pulled noodles at Xi'An Cuisine.

The next evening Tan and I walked down the three-block stretch of Alexandra Road nicknamed Eat Street because it's home to roughly 80 noodle shops, hot pot joints and bubble tea counters. The Fish Man is one of the best examples of restaurants taken up by the sons and daughter of immigrants, Lee told me. It's known for its fresh seafood in a boisterous, almost beer-hall atmosphere.

In minutes the platter of Typhoon Shelter Geoduck (more geoduck!) arrived: a chaotic pile of wok-kissed jalapeños, dried Szechuan red peppers, onion, fistfuls of fried garlic and lightly battered pieces of clam. Tan looked at the dish with skepticism. He raised his chopsticks to his mouth. Then he raised an eyebrow again, now in surprise. A dish like this contains so many strong elements that it easily can be a mess, he told me. "Yet when you taste it, you can tell it's masterfully done; the geoduck is still front and center," he said, and it retained a slightest brininess that told of the sea. We cleaned our plates.

The following night, we again caught up with Lee, who steered us to a busy strip mall. The Chinese Restaurant Awards had anointed our destination, Jiangnan Wok, the Best New Restaurant in 2024. Its menu focuses mainly on the cuisine of the Jiangsu province surrounding Shanghai.

Dishes quickly crowded the table, each showing the restrained elegance of that region's cuisine. Soon, though, arrived a dish from Hunan province–a smoked pork belly that had been sauteed with green bamboo shoots, the pork releasing more earthiness with every chew. "The smoky savoriness evolves," said Tan, approvingly.

And then Kung Pau shrimp, which was unlike any over-battered variety I'd tried before, this one full of ma la, that numbing and spicy sensation characteristic of Szechuan cooking. Jiangnan Wok produced another stunner of a meal, and we'd ended up in a wildly different place than the Cantonese flavors of Hong Kong where we–and Richmond–had begun our trip.

The vibe at Jiangnan Wok was decidedly different, too. There were no white tablecloths. Pop music blared. Couples on dates ate near groups of teenagers. Jiangnan Wok represents a new wave in Richmond dining, Lee told me, one filled with second- and third-generation immigrants. Going out to eat is no longer a celebratory occasion, or an occasion to show off, he said. For today's young people, it's just living.

As we talked, Lee grew a little melancholy. Some of the original chefs who put Richmond on the culinary map now are in their 70s and 80s, he said. When they're gone, some of those classic traditions and restaurants that made Richmond special will be lost, he said. "But this is what's going to rise up and kind of take its place," he said. And he gestured to the buzzing room.

We stood up, already on our way to being full, but still we headed out into the night: Lee had two more restaurants he wanted to show us.

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