Toronto chef Eva Chin’s neo-Chinese concept mixes traditional and modern techniques | Canada Voices

Step into chef Eva Chin’s dining room and she greets you with a cup of soup. On a windy Saturday in March in Toronto, the broth feels especially comforting.

Around two dozen of us are seated in Chin’s “microrestaurant,” Yan Dining Room, which opened in 2024. It is located in a private space at the back of Hong Shing, a 29-year-old Chinatown restaurant. For many who grew up in Toronto, like me, this mom-and-pop staple was the place to end up at 3 a.m. after a night out for chow mein and steamed chicken dumplings. But this time, as I make my way toward the back of the restaurant, it is for a different experience – one that feels intimate, almost exclusive.

In this 26-seat dining room, Chin serves us a chrysanthemum yuusheng – a take on the Chinese raw fish salad popular in Hong Kong – which brings together quillback rockfish and sea urchin from British Columbia, along with spring radishes sourced from Broadfork Produce, a wholesale distributor of farm-fresh ingredients from Southern Ontario.

Chin, a former fine-dining chef who helmed Momofuku Kojin in Toronto, defines her food as “neo-Chinese”: combining traditional and modern techniques to create something new.

Chin and her friend Colin Li, owner of Hong Shing, first imagined Yan as a temporary supper club. Their casual idea to host a few pop-ups with chef’s-choice dishes has since bloomed into what it is today: an eight-course tasting menu, typically spanning 13 dishes over several hours, offered three nights a week.

Yan Dining Room has, within a year of opening, become a mainstay in Toronto’s food scene and has earned Chin multiple accolades, including Foodism’s Rising Star award, a spot on Toronto Life’s annual list of the city’s most influential people and a No. 7 ranking on Air Canada’s Best New Restaurants list.

With its chef’s-choice menu, emphasis on presentation and individual plating, it lands closer to fine dining than what many of us associate with Hong Shing. Yet, Chin rejects the idea that what she’s doing at Yan is “elevating” Cantonese or Chinese food.

Before she began calling her dishes neo-Chinese, others – customers, colleagues, fellow chefs – often described her cooking as fine dining or Chinese omakase, the Japanese style of chef’s-choice dining.

“I did not want my food to be called that. With all respect to omakase, it deserves its own genre and love,” says Chin.

Born and raised in Hawaii to a Chinese-Singaporean father and a Chinese-Samoan mother, Chin started off her career as a dishwasher and worked her way up to prep cook, eventually cooking in top restaurants across Japan, Australia and Europe.

Her time in Paris became formative for her as a chef. Chin describes the 2010s as one of the city’s golden eras, shaped by a new generation of chefs experimenting with nouvelle cuisine. She was inspired by young chefs, such as those at Le Servan. The French bistro, run by two French-Filipino sisters, blends nouvelle cuisine’s emphasis on presentation and delicate French dishes with pan-Asian and Filipino flavours.

“Witnessing that energy really cemented the idea that there was a market for Asian food mixed with European. Ten years ago in North America, people just weren’t doing it well,” says Chin.

At Le Servan, Katia and Tatiana Levha coined the term “neo-Parisian” to describe their cooking, a phrase that would later shape how Chin defined her own food.

When Chin and her family relocated to Vancouver, she took a job as chef de cuisine at Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar.

“I felt limited at Boulevard. It was a fine-dining French restaurant, and I had asked to put a dumpling on the menu for Lunar New Year, but I was shut down,” says Chin.

She ended up at Momofuku Kojin in Toronto, where she took the helm in March, 2020. But still, she found the restaurant’s bureaucracy – Momofuku is a corporation, after all – disappointing.

She eventually moved to Avling, a brewery in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood, where the success of her chef’s tasting menu showed her that the city had an appetite for the food she wanted to make – but it didn’t fit with the restaurant’s focus on pub classics.

Yan Dining Room feels like a symbiotic relationship: Li has given Chin the space and creative freedom she couldn’t find at other restaurants, while Chin has given Li a way to draw in new diners and keep the family business relevant as it approaches its third decade. Meanwhile, Hong Shing has traded late nights for a reasonable midnight close. Perhaps Li’s choice reflects a broader shift as Gen Z is drinking less and gravitating toward restaurants that offer dishes worth sharing on social media.

It feels fitting that, on this cold Saturday, the meal begins with a silky chicken broth. Chin simmers the concoction for three days, swapping the water typically used in Cantonese soups for coconut water. Perhaps it’s a subtle nod to the island where she grew up. The result is slightly sweet and nutty, yet deeply savoury.

“Nothing you will see tonight will look Chinese,” she tells us. “I’m trying to push the boundary.”