Exploring the restaurants that bring Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods to life.

Chinatown is still brimming with great Chinese restaurants. But, in the last few years, it’s gone international.

If you venture down to the historic neighbourhood, you’ll find Vietnamese, Japanese, Malaysian, Singaporean, Mexican, Irish, Italian, Indian, Peruvian, and Nigerian restaurants.

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We may have missed one or two, because restaurants in Chinatown constantly change. By my count, there are 44 restaurants and cafés currently in Chinatown. But there are probably more.

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Janet Benedetti raves about Barbara, a small restaurant tucked away in a newer building at 305 East Pender St. The exterior is very low-key — the name is written in small letters at the bottom of a window. It’s like a secret space.

But step inside and you enter one of the 12 Vancouver restaurants that’s been given a Michelin star. It’s expensive, $120 a person for the tasting menu. Benedetti says the trick is to go with friends.

“You choose three things from his menu of nine items,” said Benedetti. “I bring friends, so we order all nine (dishes), and then we’re able to eat everything on the menu. Oh my gosh, his beef tartare is so good. But it doesn’t matter what you order, they’re all so good.”

The menu rotates, but one of the constants is Arctic char with hummus, lemon brown butter, pine nuts, mint and dill, and pomegranate vin.

If you’ve never had Arctic char, it’s very mild.

“It tastes closer to a white fish than it does a pink fish, even though it is a pink flesh,” explains owner and chef Patrick Hennessey. “The reason why I love it so much is because the skin doesn’t have any scales, so you can crisp the skin really, really, well while still cooking it medium rare.”

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The vibe is part of the experience. There are only 14 seats in a 500 square foot space, most of them arranged around an elegant bar, so you get to watch Hennessey assemble the dishes.

As luck would have it, Hennessey was shopping at Benny’s grocery store in Strathcona when a reporter dropped by to interview Benedetti. The Benedetti family has run Benny’s since 1919.

Hennessey worked at a couple of Vancouver’s top restaurants, Chambar and Kisso Tanto, before opening his own place six years ago.

He loves the community of restaurateurs in Chinatown.

“We’re all small, independently owned businesses,” he said. “We have guests come in and say, ‘I’m here for the weekend,’ and I just will write down a list of places in the area for them to go try.”

There’s a lot to choose from.

“I think there’s a very good mix,” said Hennessey. “We have some high-end, and then we also have some (that are inexpensive). There’s a place called Los Sapos (210 Keefer St.), where you can go get some amazing tacos until two o’clock in the morning for like five bucks.”

Los Sapos is a classic Chinatown hole-in-the-wall restaurant, serving up Mexican “classic street tacos” like birria, braised beef in a spicy stew inside a corn tortilla with onion, cilantro, salsa and optional beef broth.

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It has a great late-night vibe.

“Because I’m cooking all day, my appetite is suppressed, and as soon as I finish, I’m hungry,” said Hennessey. “It’ll be full of people, and everybody’s speaking Spanish. You order your tacos, and sometimes there’ll be people just jamming music. You smash a taco or two, and then head home.”

Hennessey goes out for lunch every day.

“My go-to is probably Fat Mao (217 East Georgia St.), and having the roti and the Thai rice soup. It’s like perfect proportions, delicious food,” he said.

“The breakfast sandwich at Honeybee on the corner (of Union and 789 Gore streets), is just fantastic. Honeybee is great, but that breakfast sandwich absolutely crushes. Everybody knows about Phnom Penh (244 East Georgia St.), a great institution.”

In case you don’t know Phnom Penh, it’s a Cambodian-Vietnamese restaurant that’s been around since 1985. It has a large menu, but its chicken wings are the stuff of legend.

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The 200-block of East Georgia Street has become a food hot spot, with restaurants such as Fat Mao, the Ramen Butcher (223 East Georgia); the Irish Heather (248 East Georgia); Mercato di Luigi pasta (213 East Georgia); and Fiorino (212 East Georgia), which sells “Italian street food.”

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But then you could say that for much of Chinatown. It’s a fun place to explore, because it’s walkable, has a wide variety of small businesses, and is filled with beautiful heritage buildings.

Being next door to the troubled Downtown Eastside it can feel a bit edgy. But walking down the 100-block of East Pender Street on a busy, sunny afternoon probably feels much like Chinatown did in its 1950-60s heyday.

“Chinatown is like a symphony,” said urban planner Andy Yan. “You have the bass notes of older Chinatown, the restaurants, bakeries, the dim-sum places, the (traditional) barbecue places. And then now you have the new restaurants, the new instruments coming online.”

The 100-block of East Pender is arguably the culinary heart of Chinatown, anchored by three restaurants in the middle of the block: Chinatown BBQ (130 East Pender); Golden Smell Mee (142 East Pender); and the New Town Bakery (148 East Pender). Across the street is another staple, Jade Dynasty (137 East Pender).

A good thing to sample at Chinatown BBQ is its “signature four treasures chef’s plate on steamed rice.” The four treasures are barbecued pork, soy sauce chicken, roasted pork and half a salty duck egg, a classic taste of Chinatown.

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The restaurant is owned by Carol Lee, co-founder of the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation and the Vancouver Storytelling Centre museum. Lee has spent years trying to bring back Chinatown’s vibrancy, and is big on its restaurants.

The day after she was interviewed Lee was going to the Peruvian “Cevicheria and raw bar” Uchu (158 East Pender St.) to celebrate her late father’s birthday with her mom and brother. Two days later, she was slated to go for dinner to Kissa Tanto (263 East Pender St.), an internationally acclaimed Italian-Japanese fusion restaurant.

Kissa Tanto and its sister restaurant, Bao Bei (163 Keefer St.), led the wave of chic new restaurants and bars in Chinatown that helped make it cool again. Both are the vision of restaurateur Tannis Ling and Chef Joel Watanabe, and are as visually appealing as the food.

“I could never understand why you did not have Chinese food in a kind of more comfortable atmosphere rather than the big banquet halls with the bright lighting,” said Ling. “There is nothing wrong with that, the food is amazing, but sometimes you just want to get cosy and have a small table and a good wine list and good cocktails.”

She opened Bao Bei in 2010, and didn’t set out to choose Chinatown as a locale — “it just clicked” when she was looking for the right space. Cam Watt opened the stylish bar The Keefer down the street at 135 Keefer, and all of a sudden a quiet corner of Chinatown became a trendy destination.

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“We opened a month or two apart from each other,” said Ling. “We’ve kind of had this symbiotic relationship where people would go for a drink there, and then come over to us for dinner, or they’d have dinner with us, and then go have drinks over there.”

The Keefer was recently named the best bar in Canada by 50 Best, which bills itself as “the leading authority in global gastronomy and the international drinks scene.”

Kissa Tanto has also been given a Michelin star, recognition that Chinatown is happening once more.

“There’s just so much, so much going on,” said Ling. “There’s two Michelin-star restaurants, the cafes. All the cocktail bars are concentrated in that neighbourhood, sandwich shops.”

Indeed. The food of Chinatown is a glorious mix, from the ginger mushroom chicken rice bowl at Kam Wai Dim Sum to the lemon-grass chicken Vietnamese sub at Ba Le (638 Main St.).

You can go old-school with a coconut bun from Maxim’s Bakery (257 Keefer St.) or enter a whole new pastry universe with a brioche doughnut filled with coffee mascarpone cream with a dust of dark cocoa powder at Mello Donuts (223 East Pender St.).

And there’s more to come. Lee has been talking about reopening the historic Ho-Ho restaurant at Pender and Columbia streets for over a decade, and she finally hopes to open in November, albeit across the street from the original location.

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Not only will the restaurant reopen, it’ll come with its famous three-storey-high neon sign, a rice bowl and chopsticks with steam rising up that features the Ho Ho name. Nothing says Chinatown in Vancouver more than a cool neon sign.

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Eat Streets: What to know about Vancouver’s Chinatown

Location:Carrall to Gore east west, East Pender to East Georgia north south.

Number of restaurants and food options: 44

What are the options for parking? Metres.

What are Metro Vancouver’s Eat Streets?

This article is part one of a series highlighting Metro Vancouver’s must-visit Eat Streets. With the goal of celebrating — and maybe even introducing you to — stretches of community around the region that have a notable concentration of local food businesses. Know of a great Eat Street in your community? Let us know where. Email us at artslife@vancouversun.com.

Read about more of Metro Vancouver’s Eat Streets:

• Eat Streets: A United Nations of cuisine on Vancouver’s Victoria Drive
• Eat Streets: Langley City’s one-way a hub of local food
• Eat Streets: Delta and Surrey unite over food on this stretch of Scott Road
• Eat Streets: Comfort food served Hong Kong-style at Richmond’s Empire Centre
• Eat Streets: There’s now a world of flavours on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive
• Eat Streets: North Vancouver’s Lower Lonsdale reinvented as a foodie destination
• Eat Streets: Where hippies used to gather on West 4th Avenue, foodies now flock for the old and the new
• Eat Streets: New Westminster gets fresh life on Columbia Street (and in a SkyTrain station)
• Eat Streets: Vancouver’s Yaletown a place to eat, drink, and ‘to see and be seen’
• Eat Streets: The ever-evolving waterfront food scene on White Rock’s Marine Drive
• Eat Streets: The hidden gem of Burnaby Heights
• Eat Streets: Kerrisdale transforms from typical British fare to a world of delicious new flavours
• Eat Streets: Abbotsford’s old town an epicentre of quirky cafés
• Eat Streets: Vancouver’s Main Street remains valiantly local, international and eclectic
• Eat Streets: The unexpected culinary delights of Vancouver’s Joyce Collingwood
• Eat Streets: Forget trendy — Vancouver’s South Fraser is ‘where you come for authentic’
• Eat Streets: 90+ food spots in North Vancouver’s Central Lonsdale district
• Eat Streets: Everything is on the menu in Steveston but seafood is still the specialty
• Eat Streets: Vancouver’s West End has fast, affordable options — with a side of spectacular views

Bookmark THIS PAGE to read the latest instalment every Wednesday.

Then and now: Vancouver’s Chinatown

jmackie@postmedia.com

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