A stroll down ‘Food Street’ in Richmond, B.C. offers a taste of nostalgia | Canada Voices

I had landed the day before in Vancouver, a city that has long been a culinary destination with its Michelin-starred tasting menus, its sophisticated sushi counters and its upscale dim sum restaurants. But I bypassed it all to spend the day 14 kilometres south of the big city in Richmond on the famed Alexandra Road, known locally as “Food Street.”

While the setting was in suburbia, filled with low-rise development and parking lots, everything was walkable: Alexandra Road’s restaurants are concentrated on three blocks in a constellation of plazas. In just one of those plazas, you can get Sichuan hot pot, Taiwanese popcorn chicken, Hong Kong cafe-style wonton noodles and, as I was delighted to discover that day, geoduck.

When I saw geoduck featured on the menu at the Fish Man, I felt like an archaeologist finally laying my hands on an artifact from a long-rumoured but rarely seen tribe. I had heard about the Pacific saltwater clam two decades earlier but never had the chance to try it.

Before taking our geoduck to the kitchen, manager Lisa Zhang approached our table holding a tray. She set it down for us to ogle the clam in its raw state, as if it were a rare gemstone.

Instead of oohing and ahhing, Pansy, my dining companion and I stifled giggles.

Geoduck is the most nakedly phallic thing one can eat. Its siphon is a fleshy, wrinkly mass that looks like it was taken from between E.T.’s legs. The one before us was sizeable: including its shell, it was more than a foot long.

Zhang whisked it back to the kitchen and returned just 10 minutes later with half the clam cut into translucent, tissue-thin slices that were lightly poached and dressed with soy sauce and glistening strips of scallion and ginger ($38). The other half of the geoduck arrived soon after, cooked Hong Kong typhoon shelter style, named for the way fishermen cook fish when they are sheltering from a typhoon, using limited ingredients they can easily store on their boats: battered, fried and showered in crispy garlic, scallions and peppers ($48).

We made a decent dent in both but Pansy and I kept returning our chopsticks again and again to pluck another piece of the simpler poached preparation. Each tender slice had a clean, sweet flavour that was a perfect palate cleanser between the salty, umami and sour bites in the rest of our meal.

Despite the delicacies on offer – including the toddler-sized Norwegian king crab sitting in a tank at the back corner that one could have for $599 – there was nothing stuffy about the Fish Man. Sure, a seafood meal is a splurge, but there were no white tablecloths or fussy plating here; everything arrived on a large platter to be enjoyed family style. We opted for the fried Dungeness crab ($88), which arrived with food-safe disposable gloves, which we donned before digging in. After extracting the sweet meat from the legs, we gnawed on the shells, not wanting a single bit of the crispy, salted egg yolk coating that covered them go to waste.

At a table nearby, a family with young kids sat holding out their bowls while their matriarch stood and ladled up servings of sour cabbage fish hotpot ($79), filled with lingcod, pickled cabbage and green peppers and pleasantly numbing Sichuan peppercorns. We had some at our table, too, and it was unlike any fish soup I’d had before: spoonfuls of the pickly broth were as flavour-packed as the tender chunks of lingcod.

The Fish Man is just one of many Sichuan joints on Alexandra Road, and a survey of the different cuisines present along this 900-metre stretch – Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Taiwanese – tell the story of the waves of immigration to Richmond, whose population is more than 80 per cent racialized.

But this isn’t what Food Street always looked like.

To my friend Pansy, who grew up in the Vancouver area in the mid-1990s, Alexandra Road represented peak Hong Kong culture: Cantopop played over the radio, TV dramas beamed over satellite, karaoke. In high school, Pansy and her friends would skip school and head to Max Noodle House for lunch to order comforting bowls of wonton noodles.

Three decades later, Max Noodle House is still here and so are those wonton noodles. Pansy confirmed the cash-only restaurant is a time capsule, unchanged from her youth: the booths, the burgundy Venetian blinds, even the lidded plastic vessels on each table filled with chili garlic sauce. Servers with cranky-aunty energy circulated with retro coffee pots you’d see in diners, except these were filled with green tea instead of drip coffee. Many other restaurants like this serving classic Hong Kong dishes have closed, but Max Noodle House is still holding strong.

Small dishes – smaller than I’m used to seeing at Chinese eateries – arrived in quick succession: A tangle of chewy, springy lo-mein with succulent chunks of beef brisket and tendon piled on top ($15.50). Some steamed gai lan (Chinese broccoli) with oyster sauce ($8.75) just so we have something green on our plates. And the famous wonton and dumpling noodle soup ($15), in which a few plump dumplings and shrimp-filled wontons sat above a nest of thin wheat noodles in a mild, salty broth.

For many of the diners around me it was nostalgia in a bowl, a preserved sliver of a culture whose influence has receded.

“There are traditions here that you long for,” Pansy explained.

Most of the tables were filled with older Chinese couples. They barely spoke to each other – except to ask to pass the seasoned red vinegar to shake into their bowls of brothy noodles. I could tell that they have come here and ordered the same dishes for decades.

If Max Noodle House was a window into the past, just down the road is the embodiment of the new, dynamic Alexandra Road: Elysium, a Korean restaurant that opened a little more than a year ago to replace another Korean restaurant, which had replaced yet another Korean restaurant before it. Late at night, young crowds pile in for the soju bombs (a shot of soju theatrically dropped into a pint of beer), but we were there during the day to try the most buzzed-about dishes.

The mille-feuille nabe, a hot pot dish of concentric layers of cabbage and tender slices of beef resting atop a heap of glass noodles ($45), was pretty but bland. The seafood pancake ($25) – loaded with large, tender pieces of squid, crab, clams and blistered scallions held together with a lightly eggy batter – was as beautiful as it was tasty. It came sliced into wedges that we picked up and ate like pizza, our fingers and lips glistening with the oil it was fried in.

As distended as my belly was from the marathon session of eating, it felt wrong to leave Alexandra Road without something sweet. The bubble tea and tofu pudding joints beckoned, but we found ourselves at Daan Go Cake Lab, by Master Chef Canada winner Christopher Siu. When it opened in 2023, the shop inspired hundreds to queue up but on our late afternoon visit it was quiet.

The glass display case held adorable flora and fauna-themed desserts, cake slices whose layers were so meticulously assembled, that everything had an AI-generated quality. I ordered a slice of the 3:15 cake ($7.75), which combined the flavours of so many of my most beloved beverages: Hong Kong milk tea mousse, Vietnamese coffee crémeux, evaporated milk crémeux and a pineapple bun cake base made with Ovaltine. Unfortunately, I struggled to distinguish each of those in the cake and the experience of eating it was more about contrasting textures rather than flavours.

Not everything I ate on Food Street was superlative-worthy, but I only grazed the surface of what the area has to offer. As we walked, I paid attention to the signs on other restaurants, to the diners I could see through the windows slurping pho or demolishing a plate of noodles. I made notes for my next trip to Alexandra Road – there was so much more to eat.

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The writer’s meals were covered by Tourism Richmond. It did not review or approve of this story before publication.