Restaurants
Shunde-style Cantonese restaurant on Garden City Road, focused on the delicate southern cooking that region is known for: steamed fish, double-boiled soups, stir-fried milk and fresh fish congee. Food-first, not a banquet hall.
A Bite of Shunde takes its name from a district in Guangdong that Cantonese cooks treat as a benchmark. Shunde style is defined by restraint rather than richness. Steaming, clear broths, precise heat. Stir-fried milk sounds like a novelty and is really a technique dish judged on texture alone, and a double-boiled soup takes hours in order to taste of one or two things done properly. If your reference point for Cantonese cooking is sweet and sour pork under a heat lamp, this is a separate tradition with separate standards.
The address is on Garden City Road, a block east of No. 3 Road through the Golden Village. That side of the corridor is quieter than the No. 3 Road frontage and quieter again than Alexandra Road, where restaurants stack three deep in a single block. Weeknights are easier here for that reason. You are still inside the densest concentration of Chinese restaurants in the country, just slightly off the part of it that collects the foot traffic.
This is a food-first operation rather than a banquet hall, which sets the expectation correctly. Attention goes to what leaves the kitchen rather than to the size of the room. Three or four people is the right number for a regional Cantonese kitchen, since the style is built on contrast and a table of two cannot cover enough ground to see it working. Street parking on the Garden City side is less contested than the frontage a block west, which sounds like a small thing until you have circled Alexandra Road twice on a Friday.
In the Golden Village neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Taiwanese restaurant on Garden City Road run by the Wu family, whose cooking traces back to Gangshan in southern Taiwan. Braised pork rice, beef noodle soup and small plates, in a room dressed up like an old Taiwanese street.
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Hunan restaurant just off the Alexandra Road strip serving genuinely spicy provincial cooking: chopped chilli fish head, smoked pork, and stir-fries heavy on fresh and pickled peppers. Also known for an oversized youtiao shared around the table.
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Cantonese restaurant tucked into an Alexandra Road strip, quieter than the big banquet halls nearby. Dim sum is the draw at lunch: steamed dumplings, rice rolls and taro puffs made to order, with plenty of seafood on the dinner menu.
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A wonton noodle and congee house on the Alexandra Road restaurant strip. Shrimp wontons in clear broth, beef brisket noodles and slow-cooked congee are the staples. Fast, inexpensive, and a reliable stop when you want something light and hot.
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Jiangsu and Zhejiang cooking on Alexandra Road, a regional style far less common in Richmond than Cantonese. Xiao long bao and sheng jian bao are the signatures, alongside the braised, slightly sweeter dishes of eastern China.
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A tiny Cantonese barbecue counter in the Superstore plaza on No. 3 Road, long regarded as one of the best in the region. Char siu, crackling-skin roast pork and soy chicken are chopped to order over rice. Small space, quick queue, and it sells out early.
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