Bao Bei, a self-styled Chinese brasserie, opened last year in a corner of Vancouver’s Chinatown that’s typically deserted after 6 p.m. But on this weekday night, it’s jammed with thirtysomethings in hip eyewear, eating and drinking under consommé-hued lighting to a soundtrack that veers from Guns N’ Roses to contemporary indie rock. Bao Bei, which means “precious” in Mandarin, plays off the centrality of the meat-filled bun or dumpling, the bao, in Chinese cuisine. The place has an air of informality (it doesn’t take reservations), which is also reflected in its mix-and-match decor: vintage ceramic chinoiserie and framed family portraits, including an enlarged black and white photo of owner Tannis Ling’s father at a high school dance in Hong Kong.
If one were to judge Bao Bei by the most common measure of Chinese restaurants — the number of Asians eating there — one’s expectations would be low. And yet the seasonal menu, inspired by the Shanghainese and Taiwanese heritage of Ling’s parents, can seem revelatory to palates accustomed to the Cantonese-style cuisine, with its emphasis on stir-frying, so typical in Canada. A meal begins over cocktails with such snacks as pickles and marinated eggplant. Shao bing, a toasted sesame flatbread traditionally served for breakfast, arrives stuffed with pickled onion, Asian pear, mustard greens, and slow-cooked pork. A water spinach dish combines chili heat with the subtle depth of fermented tofu. Mantou, a steamed white bun, comes filled with a beef short rib, pickled cucumber, roasted peanuts, and hoisin, creating a pillowy two-bite sandwich.
Bao Bei is one of the new Vancouver restaurants launched by Canadian-born Chinese seeking to update their ancestral cuisine. “Chinese food has stayed the same for so long,” says Ling, thirty-five, who previously worked as a bartender at Chambar, a nearby Belgian-themed establishment. “No one has ever played around with it.”
The first to begin experimenting was Andrew Wong at Wild Rice, which since 2001 has been serving what he calls “modern Chinese” a few blocks outside of Chinatown, next door to a hotel once owned by his grandfather. “We wanted to break from what people expect from a Chinese joint,” says Wong, forty-one, whose father ran a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown. “No more chipped plates, fluorescent lights, linoleum floors, cheap chairs, and over-laundered white tablecloths. We wanted to break the stigma.” He describes the cuisine at his Chinese bistro, with its walnut surfaces and aquamarine resin bar, as the food of his grandmother but prepared with French culinary techniques. Some of the dishes have been deconstructed and reimagined, such as the sweet and sour pork featuring local pork in a braisage (sautéed in oil and then slow cooked) and pickled watermelon from the Okanagan. Other menu items, like the hot and sour soup, only diverge from traditional recipes in their ingredients. Says Wong, “Our hot and sour soup recipe is no different from my grandmother’s, except she used black vinegar and we use red, because it looks more delicate and is softer on the palate.”
Wong came up with the name “modern Chinese” to distinguish his culinary offerings from the cross-cultural flourishes of fusion or pan-Asian cuisine. “We don’t have sake,” he says. “We don’t have Vietnamese salad rolls. I wanted the food to be distinctively Chinese.” (Bao Bei, whose executive chef, Joël Watanabe, is of Japanese and French descent, offers menu items like beef tartare, Manila clams — and sake.)
Terracotta in Gastown attracts a younger clientele than that of Bao Bei or Wild Rice. The slate grey and black interior features replicas of the warrior statues buried with the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in the third century BC. The soundtrack plays club music while customers sip Chivas Regal and green tea. Thirty-one-year-old Trevor Lee, whose grandparents ran Prawn House, a now defunct chain of local seafood restaurants, entered the business after promoting local concerts for R&B and hip hop acts like Boyz II Men and Ne-Yo. He and his partners began to notice the popularity of lounges serving upscale bar food to young people en route to late-night clubs, and when they decided to open one themselves his sense of cultural pride took over.
Terracotta’s menu is informed by Lee’s trips to Beijing and Shanghai, and the years he spent dining in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb that for decades has trumped Chinatown as the place to find quality Chinese food. His selection of “Chinese tapas” crosses regional borders, from the marinated chicken knees dished up in Cantonese restaurants to the beef pancake rolls popular in Taiwanese eateries. It also offers updated items like a pork belly slider on a steamed mantou bun; and barbecue duck wrap, a single-serving, pre-made interpretation of the Peking duck served at Chinese banquets. Modern Chinese, says Lee, “doesn’t have to beat you in the face with modern food. What about modern decor? What about menus in English? What about not having old ladies throw menus down in front of you? Chinese food in Vancouver needs to be celebrated and sexified.”
But not everyone agrees. While critics have generously praised these new restaurants, more conservative foodies have accused owners of purveying overpriced, bowdlerized Chinese food to a trend-obsessed, non-Chinese clientele. One Vancouver restaurateur publicly dismissed Bao Bei as “a Chinese restaurant for Caucasians.” But there’s a double standard here. It’s all right, it seems, to modernize other cuisines, be they Italian, Thai, or Indian. Vij’s, an Indian fusion restaurant, is one of Vancouver’s most popular fine dining establishments, but no one blogs about the number of Indians who eat there. Which begs the question: why is Chinese, the granddaddy of ethnic cuisines in North America, so resistant to change?
The idea of westernized Chinese food certainly isn’t new. In her academic study Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, Lily Cho cites a 1931 census that found that Chinese labourers who came to British Columbia to build the Canadian Pacific Railway had spread out across the country and subsequently comprised one-third of its male cooks (if only 0.5 percent of its population). Because racial barriers made it difficult for them to find jobs, restaurant ownership was appealing, even to those with limited cooking experience. The farther they were from cities with sizable Chinese populations, the more likely they were to offer exclusively “Canadian” food: steaks, hamburgers, and french fries. (In 1911, the menu of the N. D. Cafe in New Dayton, Alberta, included tamales and chili con carne, the mark of Chinese workers who had migrated from California.) But by the 1950s, they were also serving a selection of dishes — chop suey, lemon chicken, egg foo yong — that were labelled Chinese but bore scant resemblance to anything eaten back home.
“The Chinese learned from observation, as operators of diners, that the Western way of eating was different from their own,” says Josephine Smart, an anthropology professor at the University of Calgary who conducted a three-year study on Chinese immigrant cuisine. Westernized Chinese food “tends to be sweeter; the sauces are thicker and greater, quantity-wise.” (According to Smart, Canada can lay claim to inventing ginger beef, which was first popularized in Calgary in the 1970s.) Cho believes Chinese Canadian restaurateurs offered up “a comforting, palatable Chineseness” that smoothed the way into the Canadian mainstream.
The family-owned Chinese Canadian restaurant still exists in small towns, but in the 1960s, when restrictions on Chinese immigration grew more relaxed, it was supplanted in big cities by more sophisticated restaurants serving more authentic food — including regional variations like Cantonese, Szechuan, Shanghainese, and Hunan. Even so, the truest expression of Chinese cuisine was often, and still is, withheld from non-Chinese patrons. In a 1996 Globe and Mail article entitled “A Fruitless Search for ‘Real’ Chinese Food,” restaurant critic Joanne Kates recalled asking a waitress about a dish listed only on the Chinese-language menu. “No good,” the waitress replied. “Only good for Chinese people.” Kates dubbed what she got instead “sinoschlock.”
The so-called hidden menu symbolizes the gulf that still exists between Chinese Canadians and the rest of the population. Notions of opium-addicted coolies were pervasive enough to prompt the Head Tax from 1885 to 1923 (when Chinese immigration was restricted altogether), and a 1937 ban on white women working in Vancouver’s Chinese-owned restaurants. Today’s sino-bogeyman is a nouveau riche businessman who has raised real estate prices for “real Canadians,” and whose grade-grubbing children have made the country’s universities (in the eyes of Maclean’s ) “too Asian.” The ad hoc ghettoization of ethnic Chinese in Chinatowns has evolved into voluntary self-exclusion in parts of Vancouver’s West End and in Richmond, where one can live comfortably without speaking a word of English.
