Review: No fanfare. Just the best and healthiest at Vancouver's Seaport City Seafood Restaurant
Seaport City Seafood Restaurant
Where: 2425 Cambie St., Vancouver
When: Dim sum and dinner, daily
Info:seaportcityrestaurant.com
Chinese cooking savvy is the gift of a few thousand years of culinary and cultural history. I sensed it at Seaport City Seafood restaurant — the yins and yangs, the Confucian balance of flavours and textures, seasonality and freshness, medicinal regard, the communal connecting.
It shines in a refined experience such as at Seaport City, which includes super-attentive service that is not always the case in Chinese restaurants. It’s high-end, but the restaurant has earned Michelin Bib Gourmands during its three years in operation, meaning it is price-friendly for high-quality food. Without fanfare, they use organic ingredients when possible, sometimes from Whole Foods Market on the ground level below this second-storey restaurant.
Instead of relying on seafood deliveries, a seafood manager goes out on a diurnal search for the best that day. Pork is from Donald’s Fine Foods where the premium product complies with an excellence program for food safety, animal care and traceability.
A dish is often enough for the four to six people who gather round most tables. The succulent and delicious cumin fried lamb, for example, costs $68.99, but there are eight thick slices and for a group of six — that’s $11.49 per person. Other dishes, like pan-fried halibut, are $27. Braised pork ribs with preserved shrimp paste is $30. A half chicken deep-fried in truffle oil is $39. But deep-pocketed diners can spoil themselves on a prized premium abalone dish for $399.
Seaport City is owner May Mai’s second restaurant. The first, The Deluxe Chinese Seafood, opened nine years ago in Richmond with a similar style of food.
“Her brother is a very famous chef and owns a restaurant also named Seaport City in Zhongshan, China,” says general manager, John Wu, a nine-year front-of-house veteran at Vancouver’s Michelin-recommended Dynasty Seafood. The executive chef has travelled to the high-end restaurant in Zhongshan to learn new skills, says Wu.
“May never thinks about the cost of ingredients. She wants the best and healthiest,” he says. The kitchen, which costs a breathtaking $2 million to build, has four sections — Cantonese, Szechuan, Chiuchow, and dim sum.
With some 20 cooks and chefs, the menu runs deep, with more than 100 dishes. “If you count the different ways we can cook live seafood, it’s more than 200,” Wu says.
The dim sum is impressive. Dumplings, like the har kau (translucent, shrimp-filled) and the green-hued kale and mushroom, taste fresh and are flawlessly constructed. The steamed barbecued pork bun asks to be squeezed only to bounce back. A dumpling with onion and ham filling uses organic onions and premium Spanish ham. “It’s why we have a Bib Gourmand. Reasonable price. High level of food,” says Wu.
Steamed rice sheets, not easy to wrangle, are translucent and tender, and when rolled with fillings, resist tearing. Fried items aren’t slicked with glistening oil.
There are several congee dishes as well as refined dim sum desserts such as a honeycomb cake layered with passion fruit and coconut jelly, and a gnarly egg roll with shredded coconut, fried golden and drizzled with honey. Next time, I will try the durian mochi.
I only nibbled around the outskirts of the multitudinous dinner offerings but enough to see the care and skill in each dish. Truffled fried rice with wild organic and white rice was loosely tossed with plump prawns, pine nuts, egg white and black truffle from Italy. Truffle aroma preceded the dish to the table, declaring no expense spared. I loved this dish.
Another, simply described as “Assorted Vegetables” was lightly sauced and each veg had its say, adding to a medley of textures — wood ear mushrooms, chestnuts, gingko nuts, bamboo shoots, tofu skin, snap peas and glass noodles.
The kicker was the cumin fried lamb chop dish. It’s a two-step process. It’s fried first and then slowly braised to a super-moist, tender state, loaded with flavour. It is topped with pineapple pieces, scallions, and sesame seeds.
Dinner started with complimentary peanuts and pickled veg and ended with complimentary sweet bean and rice cake soup.
Wu suggests to ask about what is fresh in the seafood tanks and then choose the way you want it cooked. “Steamed with scallions and soy sauce, no ginger? Live fish don’t need ginger, to be honest. Or steamed with rattan pepper and chile? Maybe lobster with spicy XO sauce?” Rattan pepper is a fresh, green Szechuan pepper with sharp flavour and citrus aroma. When the chef went on a training trip to the related restaurant in Zhongshan, he returned with a new dish idea — steamed lobster with a yellow pepper sauce on a bed of rice noodles.
Owner Mai isn’t quite done yet.
“There might be one more restaurant in Vancouver in the future,” says Wu. “She has the space but the property needs work.” He hints that it might be “something like Din Tai Fung,” the international chain on Alberni Street, famous for its dumplings and noodles.
And should you visit Seaport City, there is two hours of free parking if you register your licence plate number at the front desk. Lastly, I wonder why, in a city like Vancouver, there aren’t more non-Asian diners (almost nil when I was there) in a restaurant with so much to offer.
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Source: vancouversun.com