Writing for the Vancouver Sun, Dan Fumano shared the story of Floata’s closure:
Often called Canada’s largest Chinese restaurant, Floata’s size and layout allowed it to fill a crucial role as a community hub, gathering place and special occasion venue. The restaurant’s abrupt closure — and the uncertainty over what will happen next with its roughly 5,600-square-foot location in the city-owned Chinatown Plaza mall on Keefer Street — leaves a particularly large hole in the community, as one of Vancouver’s last large banquet-style Chinese restaurants.
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Floata had struggled coming out of COVID-19, and in 2021, the restaurant’s management asked the city to reduce or waive some of the $300,000 the restaurant owed in back-rent so it could remain afloat, Business in Vancouver’s Mike Howell reported.
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When the Chinatown Plaza, with its seven-storey parkade and shopping mall, opened at the corner of Keefer and Quebec streets in 1995, The Vancouver Sun hailed the development as “leading the revival” of Chinatown. Floata was its anchor tenant. It’s not easy to run such large spaces in a city where land values, rents and property taxes are so high.
Interviews with Dona Seto and Andy Yan revealed the important role that Floata has played as a community gathering space over the last 30 years. Donna Seto spoke to Floata’s importance to her family in particular:
But for Donna Seto’s family, the restaurant served a less ostentatious but no less important role: A chance to come together over early morning dim sum.
With Seto’s father working long hours and nights in restaurants in the 1990s, the family’s only chance to all dine together was in the morning. So they would go to Floata, she recalls, which opened early in those days.
“Because of his schedule, he couldn’t come to dinner with us, he couldn’t have lunch with us. It had to be an early breakfast … At seven in the morning, I don’t want to eat dim sum, but I’m scarfing down my har gow and siu mai, because it was our family time together,” said Seto, a local writer and artist. “That’s the only time we had as a working class, immigrant family, we had to squeeze it in. It was important for us.”
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Floata was also a space where community members could encounter acquaintances who they didn’t regularly see, [Seto] said. Her parents would sometimes bump into people they hadn’t seen since immigrating from Guangdong in southern China in 1980.
“They didn’t have Facebook or Instagram, so that’s how you connected with people,” she said.
Andy Yan took a broader view, characterizing Floata and restaurants like it, which have struggled as a sector coming out of the pandemic, as a “culinary community centre”, and suggesting that the loss of these spaces makes us “lesser as a city”:
Floata was important not only to Chinatown, but also to the rest of the city and the region, said Yan.
“The issue here is that it’s not only a restaurant where you show up to eat, but it’s a place where you gather. It’s a culinary community centre.”
Yan doesn’t know what will happen next with the Floata space, but hopes another restaurant operator can take it over and run a similar kind of business there.
“These types of spaces are unique, they are built-to-suit,” said Yan, whose father ran the Kwangchao restaurant in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1960s and ‘70s. “No one’s building new spaces like that.
“What happens when we lose them? Arguably we become lesser as a city, we lose another gathering space. And if we don’t have these gathering spaces, how do we make a city?”
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