Updated 13th Nov 2014; This restaurant is closed.

I had put this post on the back burner for a long time already. I still remember the very day that we went to Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine. It was the day of the Mens Hockey semifinals. We were half expecting that this restaurant will be empty but it was not quite.

Zen had a storied past. Headed by Sam Lau today, Zen was the one restaurant which introduced the Chinese fine dining / tasting menu concept to Vancouver. This concept is a departure from the mainstream large-plate format of traditional Chinese restaurant. I had an insight of Sam’s culinary career from someone close to him and was quite impressed with his resume. I will not say who he/she was at this time because I want to write another separate post on this branch of Chinese cuisine.

Zen started in 2003. From the early years, Zen was struggling to introduce the new concept to a largely traditional customer base. Things changed dramatically overnight in 2005 when Jennifer 8 Lee of the NYT went to Zen to conduct research for her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. In her acclaimed book, Jennifer 8 Lee included these powerful words that made Zen an overnight sensation worldwide. She said that Zen is:

… the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside of China.

It was just a few words within a book in Jennifer 8 Lee reviewed of Chinese restaurants around the world. Those words gave Sam and Zen a second wind. Phones were ringing off the hook. We know because we were one of those who were trying to get a reservation when the news broke (here is our review of the old Zen in March 2008).

Unfortunately that did not last. Zen did close a few months later in September 2008. The official word has it that Zen closed then because Sam did not want to renew the lease of that location on Alexandra Road.

I think Vancouver was just not ready to accept this concept of small plate tasting menu.

Sam is back.

Still carrying the same name, Zen.

And still carrying the very words that Jennifer 8 Lee said “the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside China”. Except that the words “outside China” was dropped off.

Zen is now located on the southern most reaches of No 1 Road on Richmond. I like that location. This is just perfect for a walk along the Steveston waterfront boardwalk before or after a dinner there.

The decor is minimalistic and simple with clean lines. It is uncluttered as if to draw the focus of the customer to the food and nothing else. This is the type of ambiance that sort of make you slow down, even talk softer. You know how exuberant Chinese restaurants could get oft times.

The restaurant is spacious and seats about 35 people or maybe slightly more.

Someone commented on chowtimes that she saw cheap plastic chairs in Zen just prior to the opening. Well, it was not cheap the way I imagined it to be. It was still plastic but really, I would not count them as cheap. At least it is cushioned.

Service was excellent. That is understandable since we were there at 5PM and there were no one else in the restaurant at that hour. From the outset we can see that our server is very experienced. This is certainly more better than when we last dined in Zen.

The server came across as very confident. So instead of choosing drinks from the menu, we asked for his recommendation and that it is non-alcoholic. With just two questions, he said he will make something special for us. One of the questions was strange. He asked if we were hungry. We also told him we wanted something “light and refreshing”.

I was impressed with what Floyd came up with. On the left is a mix of crushed grapes, mint with white cranberry juice and soda. It tasted very minty and reminds me of Mojitos. What I like a lot is the load of shredded mint in it and also the grapes.

On the right is what Floyd called the strawberry belini. It is a mix of peach, passion fruit, mango, soda and syrup. This is fruity and another excellent drink that Suanne and I both enjoyed a lot.

The above is the menu. Click on them to see them in full size.

The first four menus are simply called Menu A through Menu D. Their prices ranges from $33 to $160 per person. There is also a Special Tasting Menu (not shown above) which is the cheapest at $25. Floyd said that this menu is created for the budget minded customer.

Although Zen stated in the tasting menu that the participation of everyone on the table is mandatory (i.e. you cannot mix and match Menu A and Menu B for instance), they allowed us to do that simply because we were the only one there so early. This is a common practice in tasting menus because of timing issues.

The last two menu above is their a la carte selection which has 13 items. Some of the items require advance notice.

We decided to ordered the Special Tasting Menu ($25) and Menu C ($75). I’ll go through the courses for the Special Tasting Menu first and then loop back to describe the courses for Menu C.

The Special Tasting Menu ($25)

The appetizer is Jelly fish and Baby Greens with Foam Kumquat and Lychee. The jelly is crunchy with a distinct sesame seed flavour and is fresh and refreshing. It was a small bowl.

That is the trouble, right? When you go to a Chinese restaurant, you wanted something more substantial. When you go to, say, a Tapas restaurant, you readily accept that this is an appetizer.

Taste-wise, it is really a good starter to the meal. Makes you want for more.

The appetizer is followed by “soup”. This is a deceptively simple bowl called Foamy Seafood Cappucino.

It was excellent … savoury. We can’t really pinpoint what exactly it is. When we asked Floyd, he mentioned that it is made with jelly fish, lobstser, crab meat.

In the soup is some jello-like green stuff. That is the lobster tomalley. Tomalley is the liver and pancreas of the lobster. It looks like a green paste inside the abdominal cavity of a cooked lobster. It is considered a delicacy and many people consider it the best part of a lobster. It can be eaten scooped from the cooked lobster or can be used to flavor sauces.

Nice … but again we wished that it is a bigger bowl.

First appetizer, then the soup. Next is called the Tofu & Fish.

It looked interesting but when we bite into this, it suddenly appeared to us that this is a very interesting take on the common fish paste in tofu puff … very much like the Malaysian Yong Tow Foo.

The tofu puff is deep fried to a crisp making its texture like cookies. Instead of having the fish paste enveloped by the tofu puff, on it is fish paste, chili and garlic. And topping this is garnishing of frisee (a bitter green) and thinly sliced chili.

I love the execution here. It is based on a very simple dish but made into an exquisite package. I was particularly impressed how the chili is so thinly sliced (picture right) with only the skin — really tiny but packs a punch.

The final item in this $25 Tasting Menu is the Steamed Spareribs with Black Bean on Rice.

Zen uses the best of ingredients. So for this, Zen uses Sloping Hill pork spareribs and served this in a wooden container. The wooden container was something else … it gives the rice a woody scent to the steamy rice.

I love this … a lot. I like the subtleness of the flavour in the rice particularly the scent. However, Suanne thinks the rice is bland and need more of the black bean sauce.

That’s it for the $25 Tasting Menu — four courses. Personally, I think this is a great value. The food appears simple for the most part but if you take the time to savour each bite, I think you will find the subtle difference in them and the close attention to detail to each ingredient.

Menu C ($75)

Menu C is the 2nd most expensive tasting menu at $75. Menu D is way too expensive for us ($160).

We started off with Pan Seared Fresh Foie Gras with Berry Compote, Himalayan Salt, Salad, Lychee, Kumquat and Orange with Citrus Foam. What a package … a busy package with a good balance of flavour and texture.

The hero of this starter (foie gras) however is very … (more…)

Suanne and I had dinner over the weekend last week with ET and Christina of Doesn’t TaZte Like Chicken. This was at their invitation and the day just after our first DOV (Dine Out Vancouver) event in Raincity. We were glad they did not suggest another DOV event as we already have a few planned and really wanted to try something different.

And what a difference it was … and what a choice it was too. This meal in Hakkasan does rank as some of the best meals I ever had.

Hakkasan is really an odd place. It is located in possibly one of the worst location one could probably find in Richmond for a restaurant, let alone a fine dining restaurant. Virtually all the best restaurants in Richmond are clustered around No 3 Road in the city center but Hakkasan for some reason chooses to open itself smack in the middle of commercial and industrial area. It is located on No 5 Road just north of Bridgeport.

We liked the comfortable homely setting of the restaurant. At some parts of the restaurant you might even feel like you’re dining at home.

Hakkasan billed themselves as Contemporary Chinese Cuisine. I understand from ET and Christina that Hakkasan and Zen Chinese Cuisine are related and that they are operated by brother and sister. I am not surprised if this is indeed true because many of the dishes and the style they are served looks very similar. You might have known that Zen Chinese Cuisine had once been declared by the New York Times as the best Chinese restaurant outside of China. Check out our review of Zen here and here.

For us, we were seated at the more contemporary dining area …

… with contemporary Chinese table settings. Perfect, I think all Chinese table setting should be like this … not chopsticks OR fork/knife OR spoon/fork … but, chopsticks AND knife AND spoon AND fork! The complete set of eating utensils, if you ask me. That is five if you include also your fingers which we actually did use during this meal.

They had a $1 coconut water special that night. It was a steal and who could resist any drink at $1 right? It was good, we liked it. But despite the price, we limited ourselves to only a single glass. As innocent as it looked, I think it is very high in saturated fat.

Christina, the more health conscious among us opted instead for the “Popo” tea. Per Christina, this type of tea supposedly has slimming properties. Ahhh … we have a weight watcher in our midst! This one is $3.50. We noticed that they not only top up with water but also with tea because the tea was the same consistency the whole night.

It took us an awfully long time before we actually got down to deciding what to order. They have a bewildering lots of tasting and set menus … almost all of them at 50% off! We were kind of skeptical about the 50% off gimmick really and did not pay serious attention to the “was” price and just considered the “now” price.

We opted to go for the “Abalone Set for 4” which costs $168. For a moment before we ordered, we thought that it was $168 per person … nope, it was for four. What drew us to this choice are the words “abalone” and “lobster”. (more…)

Updated 2nd Jan 2015; This restaurant is closed.

Updated 21 May 2010: this restaurant has reopened on No. 1 Road and Moncton.

Today, I am blogging about the “Best Chinese Food Outside of China” … well, that was according to Jennifer 8 Lee. Jennifer is a reporter for New York Times who had just published a booked called “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food”.

In writing the book, she visited restaurants in 42 states in the US and other 23 countries in search for Chinese food. When she landed in Vancouver, she went to three restaurants … Kirin, Sun Sui Wah and Zen. Out of the many restaurants, she chose to describe Zen as the greatest.

From the outside Zen does not really look like much of a restaurant. The location too is left too much to be desired as it is on the second floor of a smallish strip mall at the end of Alexandra Rd in Richmond.

According to the news, Zen had been struggling to bring in customers for a few years and is in the verge of closing down. When the news broke of the great review from Jennifer 8, all hell broke lose, so to speak.

From the days where there are only a few customers a week, the table seating were fully booked the week after the news broke. The only time available for us that week was 5:30 PM on a Friday.

Unlike other Chinese restaurants, Zen only have fixed tasting menus. You do not go there and pick your food from a menu. Instead, when you book a table, you will be given a menu of four choices to pick from. They even insist that the entire table have the same items (i.e. you do not order Menu A for some and Menu B for the others). It looks like Zen only takes reservation only and does not entertain walkins. All this is because Zen takes hours to prepare most of the food.

Suanne and I picked the cheapest tasting menu which costs about $36 per person.

Zen is just that … a restaurant at the verge of closing down and is now struggling to keep up. Decor wise, it is quite spartan and simple. If I may even describe it, the cutlery were mismatched. We did not mind at all but it does jump at us when we got seated. After all we were there for the food and understand the circumstances that Zen went through.

I would describe the service as “eager”. The waitresses were quite overwhelmed by the crowd and at times had difficulty communicating in English. A number of them were quite raw and inconfident, even to the extend of not really knowing what the food is called … but they made up for it by having two great person who were coming to each table to speak with the customers. We enjoyed that personal attention — this is certainly not like any Chinese restaurant, formal or informal, that we had ever been to before.

The gentleman (I did not get his name) who came by our table told us that Sam (da man behind Zen) had been working in an overdrive mode the past few days. So, their number one priority was to keep Sam healthy so much so that they do not bother to fill on empty tables when there are cancellations.

I ordered a beer, a simple Corona which is $5.50 per glass. The drinks menu really needed a fresher print. It was really old, worn and torn. I am sure that by now it would have already been replaced.

Suanne ordered their Aloe Vera with Honey. This costs $3.50. She ordered this simply because she had never heard of such a drink before. It came served boiling hot and tastes a bit sourish. It was quite good and unique for sure.

Before we got settled down with the meal, they gave us an appetizer, complimentary from Sam. (more…)