BURST
Exploring the restaurants that bring Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods to life.
On weekday mornings, but especially on weekend ones, small crowds gather around two particular food stalls inside the mall at the Empire Centre on Richmond’s No. 3 Road.
The arrival in the last year or two of the popular Cha Don and One Cafe has brought many more customers to this small, slightly rundown mall.
Retirees, students, families and old friends are coming for the kind of comfort food long served at Hong Kong-style diners known in Cantonese as “cha chaan tengs.”
It’s soup noodle sets with eggs, toast and tea, baked rice dishes and pineapple buns with big slabs of butter.
Ella Lim was on her fifth trip to the mall. She and good friend Amarlin Battur headed straight to One Cafe.
Lim lived in Hong Kong as a child and Battur was there last summer. Lim’s uncle introduced her to the stalls at Empire Centre when she moved from Toronto to Vancouver for school.
“We’ve been talking about coming out here,” said Battur, tucking gleefully into pork cartilage in Swiss sauce while Lim enjoyed the familiarity of her instant noodles with beef satay and Swiss sauce.
There are hair salons, a jewelry store, an optical shop, a tailor, a ginseng trader and a computer repair business dotted among a total of only eight food stalls so the seating isn’t expansive like it’s at some of the fancier malls in Richmond with large atriums.
Empire Centre is one of a bunch of older mini-malls with smaller food courts in Richmond. Others include the Admiralty Centre and the Pacific Plaza.
University of B.C. history professor Henry Yu teaches a summer course called: Let’s Eat: How the Restaurants and Food Courts of Richmond Reflect Half a Century of Migration and Historical Change.
Last August, his students, Melissa Lee, Julianna Yue and Jack Fun, “went to every mini-mall north of Blundell and took photos of all 550-plus restaurants,” said Yu.
There are many stories behind each of these.
Crystal Ma’s father-in-law ran the Prata-Man Singapore Cuisine restaurant on Capstan Way for years but sold the business to another owner and decided to set up a food stall at the Empire Centre for a slower pace of life.
He and others in the family are now again making their longtime specialty dishes, including Hainan chicken rice with broth that is boiled for almost 10 hours, a rich curry beef brisket and freshly made roti that is hot and crispy.
Traffic was initially steady, but it shifted dramatically when customers starting piling in for Cha Don and One Cafe, which both have a strong social media presence.
“There are pros and cons. There are a lot more people coming here and they get to know about our place too,” said Ma.
Unfortunately, the crowds can sometimes work to keep customers away if it’s too much of a hassle, she added.
Over at Cloud 9 Delicacy, co-owner Lorma Lin doesn’t open until later in the morning, but was busy prepping side dishes such as marinated tofu, soy eggs and sauteed Taiwanese cauliflower. She is known for serving heaping meal boxes filled with these, rice and salt-and-pepper chicken for $14.99.
“The portions are pretty good. Some people can’t eat the whole meal in one sitting. I can,” said Michael Zhang, a software developer who lives a 10-minute walk away near Lansdowne Centre.
He could go to Alexandra Road, which is nicknamed Eat Street for its 70-plus restaurants over three blocks or 900 metres, but prefers getting a quick, generous and delicious meal at this Empire Centre food court and not having to tip for service.
“The prices are really good so I don’t really care that much about not being able to use a credit card,” he said.
Stalls like Lai Leung Kee Delicatessen have been in the mini-mall for more than 20 years, serving hard-to-find specialties such as braised snake soup and pork trotters in broth.
Outside of the mall, the Empire Centre complex includes storefronts over three buildings that form a U-shape with more than 15 other restaurants, bubble-tea sellers, a dumpling maker and a high-end fruit salad place, all intermingled with chiropractors, beauty spas, a supermarket, nail salons and acupuncture practices.
Some such as Chef Tony, which has won many restaurant awards for its dim sum, have been around for years.
There are also newer, quirky places like Egg Lab Bubble Waffle, which sells black sesame, coconut and other waffle shells that are custom-filled with flavours like red bean, chocolate chips, Portuguese egg tart, or seaweed, and pork fluff.
At the Hazelbridge Way end of the centre, there are still posters on windows advertising The North Bistro (KSquared Mansion) and its northeastern Chinese style, all-you-can-eat buffet even though it closed at the end of last year.
But there is also a flurry of demolition activity inside the space and some new signs for the next restaurant to take on the large space. It will be Loon Fong Hot Pot, which has a Toronto-area location, and is adding neon signs and shop windows to the interior to recreate the feeling of being on a busy Hong Kong street.
Eat Streets: Richmond’s Empire Centre on No. 3 Road
Location: The address for the Empire Centre is at 4540 No. 3 Rd., Richmond, but the complex is made up of two other buildings at 4580 and 4600 No. 3 Rd. It’s located near Bridgeport Station (Canada Line) and backs onto Hazelbridge Way where there is also an entrance and exit.
Number of restaurants and food options: Eight in the indoor mall food court at 4540 No. 3 Rd., and around 15 in the three outdoor strip-mall buildings.
What are the options for parking?
There are many parking stalls in between the buildings, but some are marked for 30-minute or 90-minute time limits. Closer to the Hazelbridge Way side of the complex, there is a parkade with free parking for three hours.
What are Metro Vancouver 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)
Bookmark THIS PAGE to read the latest instalment every Wednesday.