RICHMOND, B.C. — This city south of Vancouver serves the best dim sum in North America.
Truly, Richmond has the most ambitious Cantonese food you can score without a plane ticket to China. To Lee Man, founding judge of the Chinese Restaurant Awards , Canada’s highest culinary honor for Asian cuisines, this gastronomic center for dim sum parlors and massive seafood palaces calls to mind those in Hong Kong. Richmond boasts 400 noodle shops, dumpling houses and other Chinese restaurants, as estimated by Tourism Richmond.
It’s hard to walk 10 feet along the restaurant row of Alexandra Road without seeing a Cantonese café (or three). More But Richmond wasn’t always like this. I’ve been going since the late 1980s.
To me, Richmond used to exemplify Kunstler’s “Geography of Nowhere”: Roads led to strip malls that led to still more roads lined with ever more strip malls. To a visitor from the States, the city was a pit stop or side trip during a getaway to Vancouver. But, in a very real sense, Hong Kong moved to Richmond.
At least half of Richmond’s 230,584 residents are of Chinese descent, according to a city of Richmond spokesperson. Many fled after China took control of Hong Kong from the British in 1997. Those waves of wealthy Hong Kong émigrés brought a demand for great food and injected competition and investment into the restaurant scene.
Today, “Nowhere” has congealed into “Somewhere”: a world-class dining destination. A place where farmers from.
