By Joanne Lee-Young, on November 15, 2017
Vancouver resident May Tsang checks out the roasted duck and barbecued pork being chopped with a cleaver inside Chinatown BBQ.
This is a new restaurant on East Pender in Chinatown. It evokes the Cantonese-style meat shops of the area’s past, but is also an example of how the city might, in the future, support so-called legacy businesses.
Tsang heard that the owner of Chinatown BBQ hired staff — two servers, a chef and a dumpling maker — from a well-known and nearby restaurant, which operated for decades but closed after a fire destroyed its premises in 2015.
“They didn’t name it (on the radio report), but everyone knows it was Daisy Garden,” said Tsang, who doesn’t live in Chinatown but is a frequent and longtime shopper who rattles off details about the area — which store moved two blocks east, the physical attributes of particular shopkeepers — going back several decades.
For Tsang, seeing the familiar face of former, longtime Daisy Garden server Mon Yee Kuang now inside Chinatown BBQ gave it instant credibility.
“People who have been coming to these places for years have relationships. It’s really about a feeling that is from the heart. It’s an emotional attachment.”
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