At the rate things are going, I think with the help of Karl, I will be able to check out the Burnaby restaurants more.

It was Karl’s turn to make the choice. He suggested that we go to the next restaurant along Kingsway called Chill.

I exchanged several emails from Flora of Chill before when she invited Suanne and I to the restaurant. We said we will go one day but we never had the chance. So this would be a great time to go with Karl. Oh … I did not inform Flora ahead of my visit.

Chill is located next door to Pho Hoa (I think). I think at one point it is was a pub or something. I am not sure about this but there is something about this location. Feng Sui or what, not many people seems to gravitate to this place. Maybe it is on this short stretch of Kingsway that people step on the pedal when the road widens a little and hence this does not have the same visibility as the restaurants just 1-2 blocks up and down Kingsway from here.

Stepping into the restaurant, we find that the place looked much better than we thought. Neat clean lines with a decidedly Taiwanese style eatery. LOL! “Decidedly Taiwanese style eatery” refers to the black and red colors chosen in the same scheme of The One restaurant, Beefy Beef Noodles and Estea. See below …

The One Restaurant, Burnaby

Beefy Beef Noodle, Vancouver

Estea, Richmond

OK, I pretty much made this up. LOL! For some reason, I am beginning to associate red-black color scheme with Taiwanese restaurants. I thought it was kind of sleek.

The Chill is spacious. I really like the way the restaurant is setup. This is so unlike many Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant. There is the normal booth type seatings on one side, a separate bar area and most others are configurable tables with nice high back leather chairs.

Karl and I were seated at the tables located on a raised platform which we reckon doubles as a stage for night performances.

The place was pretty quiet when we were there. I am not surprised. Like I said, it’s something about this location. The whole time we were there there was only 3 tables taken up.

Oh … when Karl and I was there, workers from my company were there too. One of them came over to me and whispered that “lit dow geh yeh hoe larn sek geh” … “the food here is hard to eat”. He he he … Karl and I looked at each other and said … “then why is he here”. LOL!  For a moment we were thinking maybe the food here is not as good as the how it looked.

Chill does not appear to be like many of the Taiwanese restaurants around dishing out standard fare. They try to make themselves different while at the same time serving the popular Taiwanese dishes.

There are live performances on some nights and specials on certain days of the week. They like to call what they serve as tapas which kind of lend itself with the alcohol they also serve inhouse. It sounds to me that they want to make this like a “Taiwanese Cafe-slash-bubble-tea-house”  for the grown ups.

This is what I meant when I said “Taiwanese Cafe-slash-bubble-tea-house”.

This is the first time I had seen Alcoholic Bubble Tea. I really wanted to try this but I had to get back to work. I did not want go back and run a meeting looking like I am half-drunk since I turn red very easily.

How does “Brandy Milk Tea” sound? LOL!

So instead of getting the alcoholic drink, we asked our waitress for recommendations. I went with something called the Hawaiian Holiday ($5.25). It is the one on the right. The Hawaiian Holiday is a mix of banana, coconut and pineapple. Pretty good.

Karl’s choice is the one on the left. I can’t remember now what his is called — Lemon Plum I think.

Onto the food …

When I asked our waitress for a recommendation, she so enthusiastically recommended their Taiwanese Beef Noodles. Oh, I thought that it is quite bold seeing that they are just blocks away from Lao Shang Dong. I wanted to try that but Karl did not. Grrr … since I said I will leave all ordering to him this time, I let it go … I will come back some day to check that out.

The Kong Pow Chicken above is $6. It was quite flavourful. I like it but …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Chill Restaurant and Lounge on Kingsway Near Royal Oak, Burnaby (301 words)

© suanne for Chow Times, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: Burnaby, Restaurant Review, Taiwanese

This post is not about just any restaurant.

This restaurant is the newly opened restaurant by the same people behind Lao Shan Dong.

A few weeks ago, I saw on Natalie’s Facebook of pictures of the food she had at a restaurant called The One. The pictures of the food was unique but I did not think more about it and thinking its just another nice Taiwanese restaurant. No plans at all in visiting.

Last week on the way home, I was walking past Lao Shan Dong when I saw a notice pasted at the door (above). Apparently, The One Restaurant is owned by Lao Shan Dong. I would not have visited if not for that sign. We knew that if The One has food half as good as Lao Shan Dong, this is going to be one successful restaurant in no time.

So Suanne and I immediately changed our Friday date plans to check out The One.

The One is located on Kingsway near the intersection with Imperial. It is just across the street of Pho Hong which we blogged about recently. There are ample parking spaces in the small strip mall it was on. But I do think that given the size of The One restaurant, it will be a challenge if they do have full house.

True to the theme outside, the interior is also adorned with tables and chairs in the clashing colors of black and red. The seats are plush but I do find some of them a bit small even for someone my size.

The interior is modern and spacious. It is also bright because of the ceiling to wall glass frontage on two sides of the restaurant. This is a refreshing difference from Lao Shan Dong which is always packed and cramped with nary a decor inside.

Nicole said that The One is upscale and indeed for a Taiwanese restaurant the likes of No 1, Beefy Beef, Corner 23 and others, this is definitely more upscale than them.

The One is opened for lunch and opened till late (to 2AM during weekends and 1AM on other nights).

The One is a Taiwanese Cuisine restaurant. So you get the same type of food you normally find in Taiwanese restaurants.

The menu is more extensive than the 3 pager above. I did not take more pictures because … well … I was afraid. I was afraid that they think we are spies from the competitors. So I only managed to take pictures of 3 pages. What I can tell you is that the menu is broken into sections of the following:

• Appetizer: marinated ear, tofu and stuff
• Noodles: what else … the same TBN from Lao Shan Dong!!!
• Dumplings
• Soup: what else too … the same TBN soup, sans noodles, from Lao Shan Dong!!!
• Meal Combo
• Hot Pot
• Fried Rice

On every page of the menu are the words “No MSG” … and that is good.

We did not get the TBN (short for Taiwanese Beef Noodles for the uninitiated) because we wanted to try their other stuff. But we did notice that they offer both the Beef Noodle Soup for $7.50 and also just the beef soup (no noodles) for the same price. I asked our waitress if the beef soup is more if don’t want the noodles. She sheepishly said you don’t get much more beef. She was honest.

Like all TBN places, they also have lot of drinks options … milk tea, bubble tea, coffee, fresh juice, herbal tea and slush. There is also a section for dessert and of course things like thick toast.

This was what I was coming for … and what I saw on Nicole’s Facebook.

Not knowing what to choose, I randomly chose the one called The One Seafood Hot Pot with Rice. This is $13 — quite pricey but it also came with a drink and a small dessert.

I thought the hot pot was unique and definitely bigger than most.

This is more like it … a boiling pot. Most other places have that token light at the bottom that does a little more than keeping the soup hot.

It was disappointing to learn that the soup base is milk. It did not occur to us to ask when we placed our order. Both Suanne and I personally hate milk as soup. As a matter of fact, Chinese rarely uses milk in cooking … did you know that? So you find that diary products are not big in traditional Chinese cuisine.

Normally Suanne would be the one who will finish off the soup but she declined saying that the one in Pearl Castle is better. Although it was not my fav kind of soup, I thought it was quite good.

The Hot Pot has a lot of ingredients. That included prawns, mussels, fish cake, tofu, very bouncy fish balls (which bounced across the restaurant when I dropped it on the floor), other meat balls and octopus.

The fish ball has stuff in it. I remember having this in one of the stalls in the Richmond Public Market. We like this a lot. It was kind of small … smaller than the ones we had in the Richmond Public Market for sure.

Here is the drink that came with the Hot Pot. It is an …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of New Lao Shan Dong Restaurant — The One Restaurant on Kingsway Near Intersection with Imperial, Burnaby (284 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2010. | Permalink | 15 comments
Post tags: Burnaby, Restaurant Review, Taiwanese

My Taiwanese friend, Emily told me that Shaobing stuffed with Chinese donut is a very typical breakfast item.

The place that my friends recommended is located on the second floor of President Plaza in Richmond, next to T&T Supermarket and across Aberdeen Center.

It is a stall at a small foodcourt. The stall name is Yung Ho Soy Drink. Apparently, this name is quite famous in Taiwan.

Yung Ho Soy Drink serves various types of shaobing, sweet and savory. Click on the images above to have a clearer view.

Without a doubt, I wanted to try …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Where Can We Find Shaobing in Vancouver? (248 words)

© suanne for Chow Times, 2010. | Permalink | 15 comments
Post tags: Cake Meet, Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese

I am referring to the post last week I made about Chef Hung’s TBN (TBN is short for Taiwanese Beef Noodles). Believe it or not, that one post garnered the most number of pageviews in 2 days at 1,300 hits. After a week on the site, it had over 2,200 hits with it constantly staying on the top 2 active posts. That post also attracted 37 comments.

Yesterday, we went to Aberdeen for dinner and guess what … we still see the same long lines outside of Chef Hung’s TBN.

And all these is happening despite the flood of bad reviews. There are definitely a lot of things that Chef Hung did wrong but obviously he is also doing something right.

I can’t quite figure that out.

So with all the interest in TBN, we decided to finally make the journey across the bridge to Tony’s Beef Noodle. We had heard a lot about them the past two years but because of they are closed on Sundays and the location, we had not visited them until now.

They were one of the few businesses that had survived the Skytrain construction on Cambie. But with the construction over, they are now faced with a new structure built right in front of them. That entrance to the service tunnel will definitely obscure the view from people who drives along Cambie.

But then I think Tony’s will not be that badly affected because they had built a reputation for themselves already throughout the years. Anyway, the front of the restaurant is very basic with the most important words “beef noodle” in the smallest font size. Apparently, they don’t need flashy signboards. OK, the Chinese words are more prominent and the name translates to “Brother Wong”. So the man behind this place must be Tony Wong.

I remember peeking into Tony’s before and it did not looked very nice. It was very much a hole in the wall operation. I guess they must have had some renos done recently as they are sporting new lights, coat of paint and tiled floors. The place is clean and comfortable.

One characteristic of Taiwanese restaurants in Vancouver is their offering of appetizers. They are small plates of hot or cold items which generally costs around $4 or less if you get a combination.

The appetizers in Tony’s costs between $2 and $3.50. A selection of three types of appetizers is $7.50 and $12.50 for five selections.

We opted for three types to share … from left, marinated large intestines, kelp seaweed and marinated pork ear. The appetizers were OK and really nothing to write about. It’s just that they put the warm pig intestines together with the other two cold appetizers — but that is alright.

We came here primarily to check out Tony’s beef noodles. One thing for sure, it is cheap. At $6 for small and $7.25 for large, it is more than 1/3 cheaper than Chef Hung’s $11 noodles. I think it is not fair to compare prices between a hole in the wall and a nicer upscale restaurant in a mall. But at the same time, I think I understand that people will compare. It is because TBN had always been considered as comfort food and it is not supposed to cost $11 no matter where it is sold.

So I got the Beef and Noodle in Spicy Soup. I got the large one. The soup does look very spicy and flavourful but looks is deceiving. I would say that the soup is respectable but I think I had tasted better ones in …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Tony’s Beef Noodle on Cambie and W 41st, Vancouver (437 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 9 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review, Taiwanese, Vancouver

I had talked about Ramen purists and how they defended venerable bowl of Japanese pork noodle soup.

I tried to garner support from a tiny band of Pho purists to defend with equal gusto the traditional Vietnamese beef noodle soup.

I saw a glimmer of hope for the Malaysian Curry Laksa in the effort to be recognized in the company of the big boys in Asian noodle soups.

I am still learning about the promise of the Korean Beef Bone noodle soup and their own proud uniqueness.

It is time now for the Taiwanese Beef Noodle purists not to be out done … to stand up and be counted!

And man was I surprised by the turn out.

For the past few weeks, I had been hearing murmurings about the new Taiwanese Beef Noodle (TBN) house opening in the Aberdeen center. I heard it will be upscale and that it will shake the very foundation of the Taiwanese Beef Noodle Houses in Vancouver. There were talks that the kingpins of Vancouver TBN houses were watching with bated breath.

Two days ago, I read in the Loyaukee Chinese Foodie Forum, that Chef Hung had finally thrown opened the doors of his restaurant. So we planned to go for dinner but was faced with lines that is so uncommon in Chinese restaurants, let alone a TBN.

The wait was excruciatingly long. It took us 55 minutes before it got to our turn. People were patient.

While waiting in line, we overheard one of the leaving customers telling her friend who was standing in front of us that it is “hoe sek” with a thumbs up.

There were a few pictures and signs in Chinese just by the entrance. We could not read it but we can pick up the few words on the background of the pictures. We read the words “2006″, “2007″ and “International Taiwanese Beef Noodle Compet …”. Chef Hung is some hot shot award winner, it seems.

They have an open kitchen. Eight people were working in that small space. It is a busy night for them trying to keep up with the demands. We saw them hand making the crispy pancakes and grilled dumplings.

I stopped one of waitress. I had to ask who is Chef Hung. I was afraid that Chef Hung is someone still in Taiwan who merely lent his name to open an outlet here in Vancouver.

She smiled and said “black cap” and quickly walked away with a pot of tea for the customer. Oh yeah … if you are there he’s the guy with the black cap and fancier chef jacket.

He personally prepares the noodles — most of the time anyway. I kept observing him. I noticed that every now and then, he takes a spoonful of the TBN soup and tasted it. It was very often, like once every 10 minutes. That’s a good sign … the man himself doing constant quality control.

He does walk out and speak to the customer. He stopped at the table next to ours but he did not ours!! I was dying to ask him tons of questions. We overheard him telling the table next to us that he takes two days to make the TBN soup.

Chef Hung’s TBN restaurant is clean. Decor was spartan. I don’t think anyone cared, not in such places. It was quite big and can fit quite a number of people.

They even have a VIP room which you can have. However you need to spend a minimum of $200 and are limited to 1.5 hours use. First time I came across this.

We read the menu. Our eye brows were raised when we saw that they are charging $11 for a bowl of their premium TBN. That is expensive when you could get top notch TBN for $7-$8 easily. Scanning the neighboring tables we saw that the bowls are not large, just average … we had seen larger ones.

This better be good.

Here’s the food …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Chef Hung Taiwanese Beef Noodle in Aberdeen Centre, Richmond (695 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 54 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese

All this was sparked off by the long comment that Dyn made which I made it into a blog post called Why Do Whites Accept Japanese and Thai Cuisine Over Other Cuisine. I posted it because it was controversial and thought our readers would love to read of it. However, little did I expect that Dyn’s notes sparked off a series of very long, thought provoking comments from other readers.

That got me thinking over a few comments made regarding bad translations in Chinese Menu that puts off diners who are not familiar with the cuisine. So I did some more research on the internet and in one discussion forum, there was a discussion how a western menu differs from a Chinese one.

Menu from The Cannery, Vancouver

In western menu, the dishes often describes the ingredients and the way it is prepared.

Menu from Sunway Restaurant, Richmond

On the other hand, with Chinese dishes, you will not always be able to picture the dish if you are not familiar with it. Traditionally, many Chinese dishes have a 4-word (syllable) names and some of the names have no relevance to the dish. Sometimes they even sound poetic when spoken.

Anyway, Suanne and I thought that over the weekend we just go and check out two funny sounding menu items that we know of. These are from our past restaurant visits that our readers had pointed out which we did not realize. The plan was just to go into these restaurants and order just this ONE item and do a review of them.

Suanne was kind of “mm hoe yee see” going in and ordering one item for the two of us. Taking pictures in a restaurant already catches attention but going in and ordering ONE specific dish, taking pictures and then leave quickly sure got the attention of the restaurant. But that is what we did.

Here is what we tried:

Dead Man Coffin from Sunway Restaurant

Anyone has any idea why this is called the Dead Man’s Coffin? I can only guess it is because it is …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Funny Chinese Dishes: Dead Man’s Coffin, Wild Speculation Beef Salamander and More (788 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments
Post tags: Chinese, Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese

Just take a look at the above. In my usual style of getting overly excited over new discoveries, I am going to cut to the chase and say this — this is one Taiwanese restaurant that cannot be ignored. If you like Taiwanese food, you should check it out for yourself. We like it and we were impressed.

The Sunway restaurant is located at the Empire Square. This is the same strip mall where Hon’s and Shiang Garden is on No 3 Road.

They are situated at the same place where Richmond’s Legendary Noodles used to be. I personally felt this particular location is bad because it is on a blind spot to most people driving around this mall.

The Sunway restaurant is small but bright. The waitress was friendly and cheerful. She does look a lot like Bjork, no kidding except that she speaks Mandarin.

Since she was so helpful, we took the opportunity to ask her about the restaurant. She told us that they had been opened for over 3 months already. The chef was from Taiwan in a city outside of Taipei. She also told us that they take their cooking serious and uses the best of ingredients and that they do not use MSG, baking soda or tenderizer in their kitchen at all. We were quite impressed how excited she was with her sales pitch. Seriously, all this was said BEFORE we fished out our camera and notebook. So we know she did not put this up because we were going to write about them.

Our favourite is what they call Deep Fried Pop Chicken. This is like the good Salty Peppery Chicken that we tried just a few days before at Beefy Beef Noodles. The serving is larger than we expected because it was listed as $4.25. We thought it was just an appy size. When it was brought to our table, we could clearly smell the aroma. They don’t serve this with a dipping sauce.

From my memory, the Deep Fried Pop Chicken is crispier than …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Sunway Restaurant on No 3 Road, Richmond (483 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese

I like Taiwanese Beef Noodles. My favourite places are Lao Shan Dong and the No 1 Beef Noodles House but they are both in Burnaby. I can’t think of one decent Taiwanese Beef Noodle place in Richmond. Can you?

Suanne and I decided to go for a late night supper a couple of weeks ago.

Actually it was I, not Suanne, that wanted supper. Actually I wanted Beef Noodles. Actually I wanted Beef Noodles because Suanne had Beef Noodles earlier and was raving about how good it was at the Taiwan Beef Noodle King.

Since there were no worthy Beef Noodle place in Richmond, we drove all the way across the bridge to Vancouver. We know of one place we had on our list of restaurants to try … Beefy Beef Noodles.

The newly opened Beefy Beef Noodle is actually the sister restaurant to the No 1 Beef Noodle. They share the same simple block logo.

They are located on Main and King Edward. They occupy the same spot where the Rekado’s Filipino fusion restaurant used to be.

I wish they would one day decide to open an outlet too in Richmond. I won’t be surprised if it turns out to be wildly popular given their already good reputation of serving some of the best beef noodles in Metro Vancouver.

Moreover they open till late — midnight on weekdays and until 2AM on weekends. So yeah … Richmond needs a place like this for sure.

The Beefy Beef Noodles interior is bright and spacious. The restaurant took up two shop lots and that gives it the wide spacious feeling to it. The glass wall on one end of the place adds to that big restaurant feel.

On the other side of the restaurant they have a chalk board of their specials.

Although I intended to come here for beef noodles, I ended up not ordering it. It was because they had this item called Shang Xi Style Dry Noodle written prominently on the chalkboard. I was curious about it and so I ordered that instead.

What is Shang Xi anyway? Is that the name of a region in China?

It is noodles with some minced meat sauce. The meat should be pork. The sauce tasted a lot like …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Beefy Beef Noodle on Main and King Edward, Vancouver (383 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review, Taiwanese, Vancouver

We knew of just the place to go …

… the new Pearl Castle in the Richmond Centre. This restaurant is just across from the McDonalds in the western side of Richmond Center. Lots of parking, so no fear of that.

This is a branch of the successful Pearl Castle on Sexsmith (also in Richmond). It seems like Pearl Castle is on an expansion drive. They even have a small outlet at the food court in Parker Place. That food court outlet is kind of odd to me because I would have thought that location would somewhat affect their branding. It would have been much better if they open any food court outlet in the Aberdeen Centre.

They have a unique wall light thingy which changes colors (see the YouTube video above).  With lightings like these, the crowd is young and is very much an Asian youngster hangout. So it was rather noisy and definitely very busy. We had to wait for a table but since this restaurant is also big, the wait was just 10 minutes.

Anyway, this outlet seems like it will be successful. The location is great and there are no real competition within walking distance.

Like the original Pearl Castle on Sexsmith, they have a separate menu just for drinks. The problem is they ran out of most of them. We ordered Iced Shaves and Grass Jelly Frappes but they came back a few minutes later saying that they are out of Frappes and Ice Shaves. Not good. Maybe it was because it was quite late in the night already.

The only things they had left was milk teas. So we ended up with …
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Pearl Castle in Richmond Centre (316 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review, Richmond, Taiwanese

The story is Polly had mentioned to me before that she liked this place called “Lau Wang Ji” (in Mandarin) which was located on Granville St before but was closed some time ago.  I remembered spotting the Chinese name of the Taiwan Beef Noodle King on Oak St. as “Lau Wang Ji” too.  I thought it could be the same restaurant and wanted to go with Polly to confirm it.

Yes, it was the same restaurant with the same server and even same furnitures.  There is not much of decoration but the place is clean and bright with skylight.

We ordered a plate of Pan Fried Pork Dumpling as appetizer.  The dumplings were pan fried perfectly outside with the charred marks and still moist inside.  This plate of 8 pieces costs $5.

I ordered their signature dish, Stewed Beef Noodle in Soup.  The server told us that their beef noodle has 30 more years of history.  The Stewed Beef Noodle in soup has quite a few of chunky tender beef and served with sour pickle vegetable and bok choy.  The noodle is hand made and has a good chewy texture to it.  I enjoyed this bowl of noodle which only costs $6.25.
More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Taiwan Beef Noodle King on Oak St., Vancouver (179 words)

© suanne for Chow Times, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments
Post tags: Restaurant Review