Restaurants
Lamb specialist in Continental Centre cooking the northwest Chinese way: lamb soup, skewers, ribs, dumplings and buns, including cuts most Richmond menus skip. A good option for a group that wants something other than Cantonese seafood.
Someone in your group has had enough steamed fish for a lifetime, and that is the argument for knowing where the northwestern kitchens are. Lamb is the giveaway. Northwest Chinese cooking treats it as the main event rather than a novelty, which means soup, skewers off the grill, ribs, and dumplings and buns alongside, including cuts that most menus in this city quietly leave off. Shine Valley Lamb Soup works that repertoire out of Continental Centre on Sexsmith Road.
Sexsmith sits at the northern end of the Golden Village, in the run of malls that includes Aberdeen and stretches back toward Cambie Road. It is the densest concentration of Chinese restaurants in the country, and the variety inside it is far wider than the seafood-and-dim-sum reputation suggests. Regional cooking from Xi'an, Chengdu, Chaoshan and the northwest all has a foothold within a few blocks of here.
Continental Centre is a multi-level mall unit rather than a street-front room, so give yourself a minute to find the right floor and the right door. Parking across the Golden Village malls is structured and shared with everything else in the complex, which makes a weekday easy and a Saturday evening slow. Aberdeen Station is close enough to walk from, and for this pocket of the city that is usually the better call anyway.
In the Golden Village neighbourhood of Richmond.
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