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.