The New York Times has called Richmond a “one-stop paradise for lovers of Asian food.”
With a superb collection of Asian restaurants here, it can be overwhelming to decide where to eat, but Feast Asian Dining Festival will help you with that.
Feast Asian Dining Festival producers Sonny Wong and Alvin Chow (standing, from left) enjoy Shanghai cuisine with Yuan’s restaurant director Hayley Zhou (second from left) and festival sponsor Sherry Jiang (middle), owner of Dragon Mist Distillery, and other festival committee members. Daisy Xiong photo
The new festival — co-produced by the owners of the Richmond News, Glacier Media, and Hamazaki Wong Marketing Group — will feature dozens of Asian restaurants, mostly in Richmond, that will provide guided dining adventures to customers from Oct. 10 – 21.
“We see the festival as a way to leverage one of our cultural assets here in Richmond, which is known for having some of the best Asian food across all of North America,” said Sonny Wong, co-producer of the festival and creative director at Hamazaki Wong Marketing Group.
“We want to celebrate Asian food restaurants and bring them to a wider audience.
“We really believe Asian food deserves a much higher profile than it has right now.”
Wong was echoed by Alvin Chow, co-producer of the festival and publisher of the News, who believes the event will “educate Metro Vancouver about Asian dining.
“We don’t want people going to Chinese restaurants, for example, just to order fried rice or sweet and sour pork,” said Chow.
Similar to other dining festival experiences, restaurant participants at Feast Asian Dining Festival will offer a set of signature dishes at promotional prices during the festival.
Photo via Richmond News
“[Other dining festival] restaurants usually have a promotional price based on an appetizer, entree and dessert feature. But when it comes to Asian cuisine, that kind of format doesn’t sit very well,” said Wong.
He explained that Asian cuisine lends itself to family dining, where people share all the food together.
“So we will have menus for four, six or 10 people per table. Customers will experience a consistency in the price per person, but you have a different menu offering depending on how many people you have.”
Wong said for those who are not familiar with Asian food, the festival will take away the “mystery” of choosing what to order and will make the whole dining process easier.
“For Canadians who may not go out for Asian food as often, we hear that a lot of the reason why they don’t go is because they don’t know what to order,” said Wong.
“By creating family-friendly menus for Feast, it makes it much easier for customers. Not only that the cost of the dinner is very accessible.”
For Asian food lovers, Wong said the festival will help widen and deepen their experience.
“For example, the Chinese community already goes out to have Chinese food, but we sort of know that there is a tendency to go to the same restaurants,” said Wong.
“This is really an opportunity to try something different, whether it’s food from a Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Thai restaurant, where people may not go to on a regular basis.”
Yuan’s Shanghai Serendipity Cuisine, near Aberdeen Centre, is the first restaurant to join Feast.
It will offer each group of four or six a choice between two different traditional Shanghai-style food packages.
Although Yuan’s is already well received within the local Chinese community, Hayley Zhou, director of the restaurant, hopes the event will help introduce their cuisine to a more diverse audience.
“We have created the menu to ensure it will be a great experience for everybody,” said Zhou.
“For example, we understand that many people outside of the Chinese community don’t like to eat meat on the bone, so we opted out these types of food.”
Chow said the festival has received a lot of positive response from the community since it was initiated and that more local restaurants are being added to the list.
“The excitement is really, really high. By September, I believe we will have a very wide range of restaurants participating,” said Chow.
“We invite more restaurants from across Metro Vancouver to participate in our festival, to show and tell your restaurant and be part of this tremendous cultural program.
“The festival is just a beginning. We hope to make it an ongoing program and to do more promotions for restaurants in our network throughout the year.”
For more information, go online to AsianFeast.ca or call (604) 353-4093.
