|
Growing up in Kelowna, I wasn’t much aware of any other food that existed outside of what my mother put on the table. We were British in heritage, and although she served some ethnic foods, there was definitely nothing Asian in her repertoire.My family grew much of our own produce and kept chickens, sheep and pigs. Seafood was a rarity, as it was expensive and never that fresh unless you knew someone who fished the local rivers. And rice? Since my father grew potatoes, rice on the table was a personal insult. Apparently spuds were the only starch we needed.
When I came to Vancouver my experience with Asian foods had previously been limited to the shopping mall food courts, where I sampled sugar-coated deep fried chicken balls and soggy and msg-loaded chowmein, I was eager to try all the new Asian food available to me, though I still mostly stuck to fairly common dishes where I knew most of the ingredients by name.
Although now I’ve become much more adventuresome, there are times where I am definitely challenged when it comes to Asian menu items. I have still never eaten sea urchin, abalone, or geoduck and many items at the markets remain foreign to me. In an effort to expand my knowledge of Chinese food, I ventured out to Zen, a restaurant in Richmond that was recently recognized by Jennifer 8 Lee in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles as “the best Chinese outside of China”.
To dine at Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine you must first make a reservation online, and choose your menu ahead of time. Prices range from $38.88 - $95 per meal, depending on the tasting menu chosen. The hostess was of European descent, but the owner and chef, Sam Lau, is Chinese, and after all, we were here for the food.
Our first dish up was the jelly fish salad served with vinegar foam. The presentation was precious. Lau had made a very flavourful dish with hints of sesame and the texture was delightfully crunchy. We then moved onto a whelk and curried seafood. My companion had never heard of whelk (a large sea snail) and remarked that she hadn’t had curry in Chinese food before either. I assured her that it was edible and that curry was a frequent flavour that had migrated to China centuries ago. We were both glad to have tried the new flavours, as this was the best dish of the night.
The next item on our menu was shark’s fin soup in young coconut, but even in the name of culinary adventure I will not eat shark, as it is an endangered species. We instead opted for chicken soup and dug into the coconut flesh that gently broke free from the side of its shell. “This was the kind of dining I could get used to”, my friend remarked. Neither of us had had soup straight from a coconut itself, or cooked coconut flesh.
After we picked the half lobster clean from its shell in the following course, we were then served a shredded chicken that was a bit of a shock. This we could not eat. It was cold, fatty and with soft skin. While I know it is a Chinese delicacy, this was something that two kids who grew up eating fairly western foods could not appreciate.
The final dish included stir fried seafood with egg and a BBQ pork hamburger, which we would gladly eat again and again.
While we were more than full, we managed to finish the mildly flavoured Petit dessert pudding made with black bean.
We both agreed the meal was well executed, but at $160 for two, including tip, our next few Asian adventures might have to be executed by ourselves, at home.
| 
2005-2012 Kwong Fung Group. All Rights Reserved