Restaurant review: Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine
On an inconsistent modern-Asian menu, dishes such as the braised pork belly, above, truly are first-rate. Laura Leyshon for The Globe and Mail
Chef Sam Lau can't live up to one critic's extravagant praise, but his new restaurant does deliver great value and some fine dishes
The world's “greatest” Chinese restaurant is back in business.
Remember Sam Lau? Two years ago, the self-taught chef became an overnight sensation when New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee wrote a book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, in which she named Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine the greatest Chinese restaurant outside Greater China.
The initial fanfare looked like a golden windfall for a restaurant, relatively unknown outside Richmond, B.C, that had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Alas, it wasn't enough to impress Mr. Lau's clientele, who, he says, kept trying to haggle down his tasting-menu price. Six months later, when the restaurant lease came up for renewal, he decided to take time off to search for a better venue.
And now Zen rises again, in Richmond's Steveston Village.
Personally, I still don't think Zen is the greatest Chinese restaurant in Vancouver or Richmond, let alone the world. Of course, “greatness” is a highly subjective evaluation and my criteria (based on the quality of food and service) are different than Ms. Lee's – or those, say, of the Edgewater Casino's Vancouver Chinese Restaurant Critic's Choice Awards, which will be announced this afternoon.
So let's consider, for a moment, what the Fortune Cookie Chronicler might think of Zen No. 2.
Ms. Lee's quest was to look at the ways Chinese cuisine had been adapted around the world and find an authentic Chinese restaurant (nothing Pan-Asian or too fusion-y) that appealed to Chinese and non-Chinese diners alike, while offering “some kind of twist that would hold up on the global stage.”
The original Zen impressed her, in part, because it was a tastefully decorated fine-dining restaurant on the second floor of a suburban strip mall.
The new Zen – located on the ground floor of a new, three-storey condo development near the tastefully touristy Steveston piers – is no dive. The clean, modern room is fronted by glass and floored in pale bamboo plywood. Inside, pink silk-covered sconces cast a soft glow against a sea of cream walls and tablecloths. Simple metal chairs comfortably padded in bright vermilion provide minimal punches of colour. And the women's bathroom, appointed with complimentary perfumes (Chanel, Cartier and Marc Jacobs) and a heated, warm-water-spraying, bidet-style toilet, is the height of luxury.
It's a vast improvement over the old restaurant's simple, DIY aesthetic.
It also still seems to be attracting a predominantly Chinese clientele (who comprise more than half the diners the night I visit). “This is an amazing feat, since most Chinese don't want their cuisine modernized,” Ms. Lee wrote.
Modern, for Ms. Lee, meant more than just décor. The “twist” that truly amazed her was Zen's “audacious” Western-style tasting menus. The “clincher” was the price: an eight-course gourmet meal, which then included squab and half a lobster, for $38.
The tasting menus haven't changed much and still offer a very good bang for your buck. There are now four set menus (slightly different than those advertised online), priced at $33, $55, $75 and $160.
Mr. Lau has also added a small, 12-item à la carte menu. And upon request, with advance notice, he will prepare something special off-menu with wine pairings.
Although we don't drink any wine (which might explain why the haughty waiter doesn't dote on us quite as attentively), the list looks interesting, with a reasonably priced by-the-glass selection that includes Ornellaia Le Volte and Tablas Creek Vineyard's Esprit de Beaucastel. The cellar, which Mr. Lau plans to expand when the budget permits, is housed in an impressive glass locker that separates a semi-private table from the main dining room.
We order Menus A ($33) and B ($55), which get off to a promising start with a jellyfish salad weaved with glassy strands of imitation shark fin and house-smoked salmon rolled with cream cheese in a spongy spinach roulade. There's nothing authentically (or even remotely) Chinese about the latter, but both are nicely plated with fresh fruit and lightly dressed with clouds of citrus foam.
Double-boiled soup is the hallmark of a good Chinese chef, and Mr. Lau's organic chicken broth is brilliantly clear, deeply flavourful and not at all oily. A tiny bone-in quail floats in the hot tureen, which comes with a saucer of soy kicked up with chili, ginger and garlic for dipping.
A flaming whelk shell stuffed with curried seafood seems creamier, richer and spicier than it was at the old Zen. Sweet, crunchy geoduck tossed with velvety scrambled eggs and white fried rice (a $28 à la carte addition) is an extremely generous portion.
We're very impressed. Then everything starts going downhill.
Drab Dungeness crab, while purportedly steamed live, tastes like it's been precooked and reheated. The three-leg portion is spread with a thick layer of the steamed white garlic mince that blew Ms. Lee away (though I'm not sure why, since it's hardly novel; Sun Sui Wah does it better.)
A tofu duo includes one portion that is deep-fried in a greasy shell that tastes of funky, old grapeseed oil.
Although individual Western-style plating is Zen's calling card, the cold-shredded chicken, Chilean sea bass, braised pork and steamed rice all arrive at once on family-style sharing platters. (Mr. Lau says he can only push his Chinese customers so far.)
My Chinese dining partner turns his nose down at the dimpled, white skin on the chicken. It should be yellow, he insists. Mr. Lau says he prefers the firm textures of the white skin. And though I tend to agree, this free-range chicken tastes like all the flavour has been poached right out of it.
Never mind the fact that Chilean sea bass is non-sustainable, this deep-fried filet is encased in a tough, leathery brown skin and scented with that same funky oil. Fatty pork belly, braised for 24 hours, falls apart on the tongue and smells like Christmas. But the sticky-rice risotto with mascarpone is as bland as baby food.
All in all, the new Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine would probably still rank right up there with Ms. Lee's “greatest.” And I do have to admit that it's an impressive version of a modern Asian restaurant, which is a growing trend in Vancouver.
But if you're looking for great fine-dining Chinese restaurant, I contend that Kirin is better. And for innovative, modern restaurants, Bao Bei is more of a game-changer.