By Mia Stainsby, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER -- If you hear accents from around the world and see out-of-province licence plates in the parking lot at Ken’s Chinese Restaurant (a wallflower Chinese restaurant on Kingsway), I’ll tell you why.

Earlier this year, Conde Nast Traveler magazine mentioned a dish here in a story about Vancouver being “home to the best Chinese food in the world.” That’s got to have blanketed the world in 80 seconds and landed on many a must-do list on travelling BlackBerrys.

And the manager at Ken’s has, indeed, noticed a lot of licence plates from Washington and Alberta when he looks out the window.

And yes, I, too, loved the golden Dungeness crab for which they won the Conde Nast accolade, as well as top “crab dish” awards in 2009 and 2010 from the local Chinese Restaurant Awards. The dish was invented by owner/chef Ken Liang.

His scallops with Portuguese sauce and lobster hot pot are also award winners.

What impresses me most, however, is that he is one of the first Chinese restaurants to not-so-quietly remove shark’s fin soup from his menu because of the inhumane and wasteful process for this symbol of wealthy dining.

VANCOUVER -- It’s double happiness for me. First, the start of the Chinese Restaurant Awards two years ago became my compass for bushwhacking through the forest of Chinese restaurants in Metro Vancouver.

That’s especially so in Richmond with the highest number of restaurants per capita in the universe. I have no stats to back me but all you need to do is look. There’s nothing but restaurants, block after block after block. They are so well-loved by the populace that you use more fuel circling parking lots than in getting there.

The second source of my delight is the Canada Line, which shrinks my carbon footprint guilt and my time spent in getting to Richmond, although I confess, I sped to Jade Seafood Restaurant in my gas-fed steed.

The restaurant won awards at this year’s Chinese Restaurant Awards for two of their dishes: a gold for the Mushroom Dumplings and a silver for Grandpa’s Smoked Chicken. Last year, it won an award for its Claypot chicken.

It was a good tip. I couldn’t try the Mushroom Dumplings because it’s a dim sum dish (I went in the evening) but I did try Grandpa’s Smoked Chicken. I don’t know who Grandpa is, but his chicken is sure delicious.