Foodie 101 Series: Chinese Takeout
The beauty about ordering Chinese food is there’s always something for all tastes. Maybe someone in your family fancies seafood and another wants beef? Oh, the kids are craving noodles? No problem.
Your typical Chinese restaurant has a large menu, giving customers plenty of choice and diverse flavours.
Garry Guan, owner of Coquitlam’s Legend House, gives the Foodie 101 on Chinese food.
Interesting facts about Chinese food
Did you know? When talking about Chinese food, the modern “eight cuisines” of China are Anhui (Hui), Cantonese (Yue), Fujian (Min), Hunan (Xiang), Jiangsu (Su), Shandong (Lu), Sichuan (Chuan), and Zhejiang (Zhe).
Legend House is Sichuan and Hunan cuisine mainly, with chili peppers and pepper cone used as the spices. They have an emphasis on freshness, sourness and tenderness.
You’ll see many other Chinese cuisines throughout Metro Vancouver as well.
Top 3 dishes
Here are three popular Chinese dishes to try, as recommended by Garry Guan.
1. “Xiao Long Bao” soup dumplings
This is the must-eat dish when visiting Shanghai, China. Each dumpling contains a delicious pork filling and soup. It’s the most time-consuming food to prepare. While most Chinese restaurants also serve this dish with outsourced frozen dumplings, Legend House makes it fresh in-house every day.
2. Boiled Fish in Chilli Oil
This dish has fish slices with garlic, cabbage and bean sprouts surrounded by chilli oil and spicy mouth-tingling broth. Compared with its cousin, Szechuan Broth Braised Fish, the broth is clear, instead of red, which makes it not too spicy.
3. Spicy Gingered Beef
The beef is sliced and then cut into beef strip in-house to ensure the beef quality. This dish actually originated in Canada but is embraced by all customers.
How and where to order Chinese
Most Coquitlam Chinese restaurants, including Legend House, are offering takeout and/or delivery and some (including Legend House are open for Dine In). Check out our growing list of restaurants to choose from throughout Coquitlam. You can also use delivery platforms such as DoorDash, SkipTheDishes, UberEats and Fantuan.