Hey … did any of you guys see that headline article in The Vancouver Sun on Friday last week? I mean, this one below?

Well, it is a big deal to be called by a New York Times critic as having the best Chinese food outside of China. Suanne and I knew there is this place called Zen but did not give a second glance at this because it is located in upstairs of a very small strip mall at the end of Alexandra Rd.

The article makes very interesting read … see the entire article called “Could a great review save a dining room on the brink?“.

So, Suanne and I are definitely going to check this place out. According to the article, they have a $35 tasting menu. We are planning on going on Friday this week (14-Mar). It would be great if some of you would care to join us. If you are interested, just pop us an email at ben.and.suanne@gmail.com. If that date does not work for you and you are definitely interested, let us know too … we’ll see what we can do.

Suanne and Ben

Hey All:

We’re all set. Spring break vacation this year is going to be a short one to Seattle. We’ll be there for 6 days and we’ll want to do the normal touristy places and especially also check out eating places. Here are some ideas we have shortlisted so far:

• Argosy Cruise
• Museum of Flight
• Pacific Science Center
• Woodland Park Zoo
• Boeing tour
• Microsoft tour
• Pike Place Market
• Pioneer Square

For food, we are a bit lost. So far we can only think of:

• The Crab Pot
• Starbucks

Soooo … any advice, suggestions?

Ben and Suanne

Hey All:

If you had been reading chowtimes.com via a feed reader, could you please remove your old subscription and resubscribe again? I am going to discontinue the old URL address and use a new one which is this: http://chowtimes.com/feed/

Thanks, Ben

Whew! It took us an entire weekend to migrate chowtimes to Wordpress. We know it is still rough around the edges but the good thing is we’re back in business. We will take the next few weeks to cleanup the odds and ends.

If you had bookmarked any of our internal pages, please note that they will not work anymore. This is because WordPress names pages different from MovableType and we decided that it is best adopting fully what WordPress does.

Oh … ignore the corvette on the header page. We’ll fix that later on to something more foody.

Enjoy!
Suanne and Ben

Update 27Jan 7pm: Alright … I think we got it all figured out now. Chowtimes.com will start to go dark anytime soon. The go-dark period will likely be 24-72 hours. The site is temporarily up at http://chowtimes.26miler.com. When you see a “corvette” you will know that the migration to WordPress had been completed. (blowing a bye kiss to MovableType!)

Update 26Jan 5pm: We got going again. We have created an interim site here if you want to have a sneak peak. Migrating all our photos will take a long time … estimated 7 hrs. We’ve got more pictures than we thought we had!

Update 26Jan 5am: Sigh … this is going to take longer than I thought! Am utterly stuck at this and working out the steps with my new hosting’s support. Stay tuned.

Hi All:

Suanne and I will start migrating chowtimes.com from MovableType to WordPress starting tonight. If all goes well, you will not notice any difference except that when we are done, you will see a new look and feel of the site.

It’s a complex move for us because we had not done it before. However, we felt that we must migrate it sooner or later because we were so impressed with what WordPress could do better and easier than what we can do on MovableType. We should be be done by end of day Saturday. Wish us luck!

So, to tide you guys over for the next little while, I want to announce to chowtimes reader my new blog … http://26miler.com. I hope you will enjoy it as much as you had on chowtimes. It is a chronicle of my attempt to complete (notice that I did not say run) the marathon this year.

Ben and Suanne

Well … we’re a few days late but it’s better late than never. Chowtimes.com turned two a few days ago and just in the nick of time too … our little visits counter hit 200,000. For Suanne and I, it’s a milestone that we had been hoping to reach before the blog turns two.

Suanne and I actually drove around Richmond looking for a cake to celebrate at 8:45PM. We wanted to look for one of those fluffy fruity cakes from Chinese bakeries. We went to quite a few places — most bakeries were closed at the hour of the day. We eventually remembered that the Osaka Supermarket at the Yaohan Mall had a bakery.

We simply love fruit black forest cakes like these … lots of freshly cut colourful fruits on top. These cakes are very airy and fluffy. Does anyone know how these kind of cakes are made … especially how they are made so airy and light?

Not sure about you, but for us, we don’t feel guilty eating such fruity black forest cake. After all, fruits are healthy food. Agree.

Congratulations to Christine Duncan for being the first entry with an all correct answer to chowtimes’ first (and hopefully not last) contest. Christine wins a pair of Winter Special New York CityPass.

Christine, I will send you an email later on today on claiming your prize.

A total 13 responses were recorded, which is pretty good for a start. As a matter of fact, the questions are so easy, everyone got it correct. So, it actually boiled down to who responded first. Christine’s response was received just 5 minutes after the questions were posted. In case you are wondering who responded when, here it is:

Anyway, I wanted to thank Susan Wilson from CityPass for sponsoring the contest tickets.

I think it’s kind of fun doing contests. So, I was doing a little thinking over the past couple of days. Here is what I am proposing but not sure if any sponsor will bite. I could do food reviews or restaurant reviews for any Richmond or Vancouver area restaurants. In return for a review on this blog, the restaurant or food sponsor will sponsor something in return for a contest. For example, I do a review of the restaurant, the restaurant will donate a dinner for two or something. Anyone interested to have chowtimes do a review? Just email us at chowtimes@gmail.com

Hi All:

Here is wishing all of you a Christmas that is filled with Joy, Peace and Hope. As you spend time with your family and loved ones, remember the Reason for the Season.

With warmest love from
Marcus, Norman, Suanne and Ben

Hi All … the weather is getting warmer and spring is now in the air. Time to start planning for summer vacation!! The last time I asked for advice from the readers before my trip to Europe, there were so many responses and advice that proved so useful to me. So, this time, am gonna ask you all again for tips.

Our plan is to take a loooong road trip with major stop at the Redwood National Park, San Francisco, Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. We have two weeks … well,maximum of 16 days … to cover this all. So, what do you think?

Here is the basic plan. We had covered both Washington and Oregon before and will not plan to make any stop until we get to the southern border of Oregon. Our first major stop is at the Redwood National Park before heading off too San Francisco. We plan to stay at least 4 full days in San Francisco and do the tourist sights plus a day at Six Flags. We will also spend at least 2 days in Yosemite and 1 day in Lake Tahoe. Where we stop in between these places is still to be determined.

I used MS Streets and Trips to plot this trip. The total distance will be at least 2400 miles and total driving time 44hrs! Seems like a lot of distance to cover. We had never tried these kind of distances before — the longest we had covered were 1900 miles (Banff and Oregon).

So my question is basically:

• What are the must-see and must-do places in San Francisco, Yosemite, Redwood NP and Lake Tahoe?
• What are the must-try food local to these areas?
• Any recommended places to stay in these places?
• Any other tips or advice?
• Oh … any food blogger want to meet up? This will be sometime mid July.

He he he …

OK, OK, OK …

I admit … I am a stats watcher. It’s a big deal to me, so bear with me, OK? :-)

Just this morning, this site had hit 100,000 visits. Here is the proof:

I know, I know … I am weird. I actually dreamt of this day when we hit that magical 100K visits. Suanne and I started this blog just for fun — we are still having fun. We’ll get at this for the next little while. I am sure one day, we will gonna get so bored with this that we’ll stop blogging altogether.

Visitor #100,000 was from Singapore on 8:04AM. At this rate, we’ll perhaps hit 1,000,000 visit by November 26th, 2015 at 8:40AM. Seriously, I calculated this on Microsoft Excel. :-)

Thank you all for bearing with us throughout all the 100K visits.

* getting off my soapbox *