VANCOUVER—Noodles have become standard fare in Canada’s big cities and the Vancouver restaurant that started it all is hoping to return to its Chinatown birthplace.
After Hon’s Wonton Noodle House shut its doors in the neighbourhood more than a year ago — one of dozens of Chinatown businesses to close in recent years — the company’s current owner, Raymond Leung, said he intends to move back to the hood by the end of the year.
“In an ideal world, we would have opened in Chinatown first. But the timing of real estate is a finicky thing,” he said, confirming he intends to open up three restaurants in the Lower Mainland with a Chinatown location as soon as he finds a spot.
Hon Ip opened the first Hon’s Wonton Noodle House on Main and Pender streets in 1972, when Chinatown was the hub of the city’s Chinese-Canadian community. For a while, it was the only place in Vancouver to get a steaming bowl of wonton noodles and potstickers, said Leung.
Leung is partnering with restaurant-chain company, Box Concepts Food Group, to relaunch Hon’s restaurants, which has struggled in recent decades as consumers chose trendier food options. They made their first announcement last week — a 1,000-square foot restaurant in Olympic Village, opening in late June. He intends to open two more locations in the next six months and one of them, he hopes, will be in Chinatown.
The neighbourhood has always been close to Leung’s heart.
Like so many people, his first restaurant experience in Canada was at Hon’s, in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It was Sept. 21, 1975 — his mom’s birthday.
“I remember it as though this was yesterday, because it was our first birthday in our family in Canada,” he said. “We were poor immigrants. We saved up our money. My dad gave me a $20 bill for the meal, which was a lot of money back then.”
Vancouverite and urban planner Andy Yan remembers the flagship restaurant and its street-facing kitchen in Chinatown well.
“It was this incredible noodle shop where you see those steaming cauldrons of hot water. You could just stand there and watch the flips and turns as they made the noodles,” Yan said.
Many Cantonese noodle houses featured a front-facing kitchen where chefs cooked the noodles and a main kitchen in the back where other menu items were made. Wonton noodles are thin and yellow, traditionally cooked just long enough so they are chewy. The noodles are often served in soup and with wontons, hence the name.
But Chinatown has lost much of the hustle-and-bustle feel of those days. Many children of immigrants don’t frequent the area anymore and recent immigrants are settling in other parts of the Lower Mainland.
The Chinatown Business Improvement Association has been trying to attract new businesses to the area, with some success. But many of those new businesses, such as Bestie, a German sausage shop, Ramen Butcher and Caffe Brixton, don’t come from the Cantonese tradition that Chinatown is known for. Some community advocates are now emphasizing the importance of preserving the Cantonese heritage.
June Chow, co-founder of the Youth Collaborative for Chinatown, said she is grateful to see the iconic Hon’s restaurant return to its birthplace.
“Hon’s is an important counter balance to the displacement and loss, the trend that has been happening in recent years,” she said.
Community leader and entrepreneur Carol Lee opened Chinatown BBQ, a barbecue meat shop, last winter. It serves all of the old favourites, including BBQ pork and duck. Lee is also renovating Fu’s Ho Ho, the iconic Chinese eatery on Pender and Columbia streets and plans to reopen that restaurant as well.
Like noodle houses, those restaurants offer a low-cost and quick meal option for the Chinese seniors in Chinatown, Chow said. She remembers bringing her grandmother to Hon’s every week. It was a safe space for long-time community members and was part of her grandmother’s support network, she said.
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Chow is cautiously optimistic the new version of Hon’s will offer the same thing.
Lawrence Eade, CEO at Box Concepts, said the new Hon’s location at Olympic Village will be “intimate, simple, and cozy” and feature new branding and a new menu. He and Leung hope the new restaurant will feel welcoming to everyone, even to people who have never had a bowl of wonton noodles before.
“Like any ethnic food, there are some intimidation factors,” Eade said. “We want to make this as welcoming and unintimidating experience as possible.”
There are three restaurants in the Lower Mainland that lease the Hon’s name in New Westminster, Coquitlam and Robson Street in Vancouver. Another restaurant that leased the Hon’s name in Chinatown switched to a different name after the new owners started serving Korean food last year. Leung is negotiating with the remaining three in hopes they too will change their names, to ensure customers are not confused when new Hon’s restaurants open.
In addition to the Olympic Village and Chinatown, he and Leung are looking for possible locations in Kitsilano, downtown Vancouver, UBC and Lonsdale. But in a city where real estate, including retail spaces, is punishingly expensive, success is not guaranteed, Yan said.
“Its probably far more profitable to flip real estate than it is to run a small business,” said Yan, whose work at Simon Fraser University’s city program focuses on housing and urban planning. “We don’t particularly make it easy on our small independent businesses to succeed in the City of Vancouver.”
But Hon’s has an advantage that most other restaurants don’t. It already has a thriving light-industry department, where it distributes packaged noodles and rice rolls to grocers such as Loblaws and dozens of restaurants in the Lower Mainland. Many people have probably eaten Hon’s noodles and don’t even know it, Leung said.
He confirmed Hon’s will continue to make and distribute noodles and dumplings. Yan and Chow agree — it all goes to show how tightly Hon’s is woven into noodle culture.
“It’s actually quite simple,” Chow said, “I think any noodle place has to really give due credit to Hon’s for bringing noodles to the people.”
Correction - May 24, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Raymond Leung’s mother’s birthday as Sept. 21. As well, Leung is negotiating with the three remaining restaurants, not Lawerence Eade.
