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Missing Chopsticks

Where: 130-13880 Wireless Way, Richmond

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When: Dinner, Thursday to Sunday and alternate Wednesdays

Info: 604-783-8353. missingchopsticks.com

The first thing I liked about Missing Chopsticks is its offbeat location with easy parking. No circling around as you do in restaurant-dense areas of Richmond.

This 14-seat restaurant finds itself in the Trove, an unusual condo complex for designer cars, the ultimate man cave with a golf simulator, coffee bar and other amenities. A chef’s tasting menu is but a few steps away at Missing Chopsticks.

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The three restaurant owners, friends since high school, are chef Edward Cheng, Lewis Fan, and Jacqueline Wong, the spark behind the Missing Chopsticks name.

“It feels Asian but no chopsticks,” Cheng says. It’s his first time as exec chef and owner.

The food melds Cheng’s Chinese heritage and his training at restaurants operated by two of the most revered chefs on the planet — Alain Ducasse’s Spoon and Rech and Joël Robuchon’s L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon. That was in Hong Kong. In Vancouver, Cheng worked at Hawksworth’s catering division. Haute cuisine isn’t matched by haute wages, so he’s also spent some years at a Hyatt Regency banquet division and at a retirement home, cooking for “much better pay.”

While he can’t offer the Robuchon or Ducasse food experiences with Missing Chopsticks’ tiny staff and its much lower prices, the discipline, organization and a keen understanding of ingredients were deeply instilled.

“It makes me work harder, to be honest,” Cheng says of the resource deficit. And with inflation coming at him from all directions, he’s simplified even further.

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“You have to know the seasons, when to use produce, how to make the flavours come out. And it really takes studying under a good mentor,” Cheng says.

When I visited, the six-course dinner cost $138 but he’s changed tacks since then, lowering the price to between $98 to $108 and offering five courses with optional add-ons. His tasting menus are elevated, creative, thoughtful, and finely presented — some dishes more so than others. The dishes I had will have vanished by the time you read this as the menu changes regularly; sometimes it’s a wholesale change to follow a theme, like the recent stylized hawker menu.

He sources fresh, local sustainable ingredients from Richmond farms and vendors like Fresh Ideas Start Here in Burnaby.

“I’ll drive to farms myself to pick up things in season,” he says.

My dinner began with beautiful isaki, or chicken grunt fish, pinkish and delicately rolled, dabbed with caviar, and served atop a mound of julienned celeriac remoulade with a rice cracker, hovering like a floating butterfly. The fish had been wrapped in kombu overnight to add a little magic.

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A dish of steamed egg —  served with superior stock (chicken bones, Chinese ham), mushrooms, sliced sea cucumber and uni — was a dreamy comfort dish, soft and creamy with a bit of sea cucumber chew.

Roasted root vegetables with quinoa, black truffle and vegetable jus celebrated plants with nine kinds of baby vegetables. He roasted the trimmings for stock to reduce into a sauce. “Not many chefs serve a quinoa and vegetable course in the middle of a tasting menu but I want people to eat more vegetables, to make them shine,” he says.

A neat nest of pasta noodles came next, ready for a roll in a pool of velvety soubise sauce (onions, butter, cream) with grated dried mullet roe. Cheng adds a slight chew and crinkle to the noodles using alkaline water; I liked it the same as I like ramen noodles made with alkaline water.

For the meat course, we had the choice of the chicken or squab that evening. The chicken was a substitute option. Guests had once clamoured for a take-home version of the flavourful Wingtat chicken Cheng served on a tasting menu, so it can now be ordered online, roasted whole, somewhat like Peking duck with a very crispy skin, and enough to serve four people. It’s stuffed with chicken breast mousse, spinach, ginger and shallots and you can order sides to accompany it. At the restaurant, he parlays it into a chicken breast roulade with the same stuffing as the optional offer. It came with fondant potatoes and mushrooms.

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A crispy-skinned squab was served two ways. The breast came with a drunken peppercorn jus and roasted chestnut. The thigh meat is shaped around the drumstick, cooked in a sous vide, brushed with the sauce, then torched and coated with a seed and nut mix. It’s served in a bowl atop thyme leaves, torched at the table to add smokiness. The salsify was given lots of love as well — slow-cooked in chicken stock and lemon juice, glazed with butter and more sauce, and criss-crossed with purées of garlic and chestnut.

Dessert was a clafoutis with orange and grapefruit standing in for cherries. It was more of a thin cake than custardy, and topped with a scoop of ice cream and decorative cookies, which were overbaked. This dish wasn’t up to the level of the others.

The service and ambience were also underwhelming, considering the refined food. The loud ventilation system from the open kitchen didn’t help and, apart from a warm welcome, service was stilted; our server delivered dishes and quickly rushed off.

Wine advisers help with wine lists and pairings as menus change; usually there’s about seven whites, eight reds and some bubblies as well as a small cocktail list. Wine pairings with dinner are $59. Co-owner Fan says wine connoisseurs can bring their own wines for $50 per bottle corkage.

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The second floor of Missing Chopsticks is an elegant private space for groups of up to 10, with a TV, and a minimum charge of $1,000.

Side dishes

Inflation buster

Not lying! I had a breakfast of two eggs, ham, toast, and potatoes for $2.95. Call it a loss leader but this inflation-busting, all-day breakfast makes Bon’s Off Broadway, 2451 Nanaimo St., in Vancouver a very busy place. The rest of the diner-style menu is reasonably priced — plain omelette, $14; cheeseburger, $16; half a barbecued chicken, $24. Bon’s is huge on attitude. The walls are totally splattered in a riot of customer-supplied graffiti and glued-on posters. Owner Bon Wong’s two burly sons — cool hair, tattoos, black Trev Deeley T-shirts — work the front cheerfully and efficiently. The family’s run the place since 1996 and that All Day Breakfast has been $2.95 since then. Even back then, the price was ridiculous. — Mia Stainsby

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