Vancouver

The dining scene

Metro Vancouver’s East Asian restaurant map is regional, not downtown-only. Richmond’s Golden Village (No. 3 Road and nearby malls) is the dense Chinese and pan-Asian core: Cantonese banquet halls, made-to-order dim sum, regional Chinese rooms, and food-court specialists. Vancouver proper holds the historic Chinatown layer plus Mount Pleasant, Fraserhood, Kitsilano, and Commercial Drive for Japanese omakase, Thai, Vietnamese, and newer Korean taverns. Burnaby adds Metrotown’s mall-adjacent Asian density and, with Coquitlam’s North Road corridor, the region’s main Korean dining strip.

For visitors, geography comes before format. Dim sum and Cantonese seafood point to Richmond; walkable heritage Chinese and newer Chinatown kitchens sit east of downtown; Korean barbecue and stew houses concentrate on Burnaby and Coquitlam’s North Road with secondary Metrotown options; Thai and Vietnamese depth runs through Kitsilano, Mount Pleasant, and Commercial Drive. Cuisine hubs and restaurant pages below cover the first stops.

How East Asian dining took shape here

Chinese settlement in Greater Vancouver runs from nineteenth-century railway and cannery labour through Vancouver’s Chinatown (Canada’s largest historic Chinatown by the early 1900s) and early Richmond bunkhouse communities near Steveston canneries. Exclusion laws and limited employment pushed restaurants into a central economic role for Chinese Canadians for decades.

From the 1980s through the 1990s, Hong Kong immigration, then Taiwan and later mainland China arrivals, shifted Chinese dining power into Richmond’s City Centre. Banquet seafood, competitive dim sum, and mall food courts remade Golden Village into a North American destination for Cantonese cooking. Parallel Korean settlement thickened along Kingsway and North Road in Burnaby and Coquitlam; Vietnamese and Thai kitchens spread through East Vancouver and Kitsilano.

The 2020s added Michelin Guide Vancouver (from 2022), which spotlighted Japanese counters, Vietnamese Bib Gourmands, Thai rooms, and a few Chinese addresses inside the City of Vancouver. Richmond remains largely outside that coverage even as Chinese Restaurant Awards and local press continue to treat it as the region’s Chinese dining capital.