Eat Streets: A United Nations of cuisine on Vancouver’s Victoria Drive

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New series explores the restaurants that bring Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods to life.

The neighbourhoods around Victoria Drive in east Vancouver are incredibly ethnically diverse.

And its restaurants reflect it. Between East 33rd and 41st, for example, there are over 30 restaurants and cafés serving food from around the world.

Many offer varieties of Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine. But there are also Japanese, Mexican, Salvadoran, Ukrainian, Indian, Korean, Filipino and Middle Eastern restaurants and bakeries, as well an old school pizza joint called Neighbours.

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“It’s like a little international town, this street, everybody has their own food,” said Maria Avila of Adelitas, a Mexican restaurant at 5178 Victoria Dr.

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“(For) people who want to enjoy different ethnic or international food, this is a good place. People who come to have Vietnamese food, they see us, and if they want to try something from Mexico, they come here.”

It’s like a little international town, this street, everybody has their own food.

Maria Avila of Adelitas

Most of Victoria Drive’s restaurants are also quite small, classic mom and pop jobs. Adelitas has only 20 seats and minimal decoration — a few sombreros and Mexican papel picado, which is brightly coloured folk art paper cut-outs.

It offers traditional dishes that you’d find in Avila’s native Mexico City, such as enmoladas, corn tortillas filled with chicken, beef or veggies and covered in a rich mole sauce.

“We do everything from scratch,” said Avila. “I think that’s the secret, that the flavours here are authentic.”

The restaurant has been around since 2014. One of the keys to its survival is that the rent is cheap. Victoria Drive is filled with affordable older buildings, not the expensive new highrises common downtown.

“That’s the Jane Jacobs line, cities need old buildings,” said Andy Yan, director of the City program at Simon Fraser University, referring to the urbanist who wrote the landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

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Yan calls areas like this “startup neighbourhoods,” where the cheap rent allows new arrivals to Canada to start up their own businesses, often restaurants.

“These are immigrant entrepreneurs,” he said. “They have a few dollars and open up a small business, trying to make a go of it.”

Because money is tight, many restaurants on Victoria Drive don’t have websites, and may not show up on a Google map or street view search. So you have to check them out the old-school way — by going there.

Writer Chris Cheung grew up around the area — his family had a business there. But it has evolved over the years, and still is, as different waves of immigrants have come into Vancouver.

“Growing up the stretch that you’re talking about was very Italian,” he said. “My fondest memories were going to the Calabria bakery over there. They had a meat shop as well.

“Now it’s become this interesting extension of, I don’t know if you would want to call it Little Saigon, but like the Vietnamese presence on Kingsway.”

Hien Nguyen of Dalat restaurant (5497 Victoria Dr.) agrees.

“It used to be Kingsway had a lot of Vietnamese restaurants,” said Nguyen, whose restaurant specializes in food from central Vietnam.

“But I think they started closing a lot, after COVID happened. But a lot of them still operate on this street.”

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Cheung can rhyme off all sorts of favourite restaurants and dishes.

“There’s a few landmarks that people go to down there,” he said.

“One of them is a restaurant called Hoang Yen (5155 Victoria Dr.), and they have two signature dishes. There’s the bún chả cá, which is like dill fish soup noodle. And then there’s the bun rieu, which is like a pork and crabmeat cake in a tomato base, another soup noodle.”

On the weekends, this stretch of Victoria Drive is buzzing.

“Banh Mi Saigon (5397 Victoria Dr.) has great sandwiches but also great paté chaud,” says Cheung.

“Lien Hiep (5083 Victoria Dr.) has fantastic steamed rice rolls for breakfast. Love the crispy shallots contrasting with the soft thin rice crepe.”

For dim sum, Western Lake Chinese Seafood (4989 Victoria Dr.) is a longtime hot spot. Old Chinatown watchers may be surprised to discover that Kent’s Kitchen is still operating at 5659 Victoria Dr., after closing down its Keefer street location a couple of years ago.

This part of Victoria Drive also has many chain restaurants and coffee shops, such as Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Tim Hortons and Starbucks. Most of them are near East 41st.

That said, you can go to a chain anywhere. The reason to go to Victoria Drive is to find delicacies like the to-die-for paklava at Kamo bakery, a “taste from Middle East” at 5552 Victoria Dr.

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Owner Kamo Mawlood is Kurdish, from Arbil in the Kurdish part of Iraq. But he says his bakery is a mix of Middle Eastern flavours — Kurdish, Turkish, Syrian, Iranian.

“But in the end, its (its) own recipe,” he said. “We changed the recipe.”

Many of the restaurants are concentrated between East 34th and 37th, which makes a visit to the restaurants of Victoria Drive very walkable.

There are also some interesting businesses to visit, such as the SPCA thrift store (5239 Victoria Dr.), a large space that always seems to have something cool and unusual.

Case in point: a wicker letter holder that says “Hawaii” on top and is decorated with a palm tree flanked by two women in grass skirts, one playing a ukulele, one dancing.

It was only $2. So I bought it.

Eat Streets: What to know about this stretch of Victoria Drive

Location: Victoria Drive between East 34th and East 37th

Number of restaurants and food options: 33

What are the options for parking?

The area has some spots free for two hours, but there is also some pay parking.

What are Metro Vancouver’s Eat Streets?

This article is part one of a series highlighting Metro Vancouver’s must-visit Eat Streets. With the goal of celebrating — and maybe even introducing you to — stretches of community around the region that have a notable concentration of local food businesses. Know of a great Eat Street in your community? Let us know where. Email us at artslife@vancouversun.com. And watch for our next Eat Street on March 4.

Then and now: Victoria Drive in pictures

jmackie@postmedia.com

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