Restaurant review: Do Chay is mostly vegan and very Vietnamese
Credit to Author: Mia Stainsby| Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 18:00:00 +0000
Where: 1392 Kingsway, 604-225-8349
When: Open for lunch and dinner, daily.
More info: instagram.com/dochay
When you see “Ish” sauce on the menu at Do Chay, don’t blame autocorrect. It means you’re at a vegan/vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant and Ish is their house-made vegan stand-in for fish sauce, an ingredient central to Vietnamese cooking.
Ish involves a lot of ingredients, but fermented mung beans mimmick the funk of fermented fish sauce — and it works.
The Do family came to Canada via a Malaysian refugee camp, dispossessed of home and country. Mom and dad met in Creston, B.C., then moved to Prince George. They worked incredibly hard, picking apples, sewing, labouring in a lumber yard and making desserts to sell to stores.
“They came with nothing,” says son Patrick. “Seriously, they worked really, really hard. And now I’m able to stand on their shoulders.”
Yes, look at them now, operating some of the best Vietnamese restaurants in Metro Vancouver — the others are Green Lemongrass on Kingsway, Broken Rice in Burnaby (sold a couple years ago) and House Special in Yaletown.
Patrick and Amanda Clark, his partner, oversee the newest offspring, Do Chay (which means vegetarian things), a mostly vegan Vietnamese restaurant which opened in May.
“Every once in a while, we’ll throw an egg in there,” says Patrick.
Dad’s like the general contractor in the build outs, mom is the memory card for Vietnamese cooking and Patrick and his sister Victoria (at House Special) are modernizing and taking local Vietnamese food to the next level. They tweak, innovate and personalize the food and the restaurants while mom, Yen Do, is in there keeping it Vietnamese.
And they keep it real. For example, although time-consuming, they make their own tofu to avoid chemicals and preservatives. The popular dish — served with black truffle sauce, ginger, spring onion, and onion confit oil — had sold out when we visited and I don’t see it on an updated menu. Fair enough. There’s enough creativity and deliciousness on the menu without it.
For instance, the seitan calamari lotus salad ($12) plays impostor very well. The seitan strips, made of wheat gluten, did indeed have the texture of deep-fried calamari and was served with a refreshing toss of marinated cucumber, pickled lotus stem, wood ear mushrooms and chopped peanuts. There’s not a lot of other meat or seafood wannabes.
“I love it when people say I don’t miss the meat,” says Patrick. “It’s the biggest compliment.”
Intense and varied flavours make up for the missing animal life. Do Chay makes vegetables taste so damned delicious in street food, noodle and rice bowl forms.
Coconut rice cakes (banh khot) are traditionally served with shredded dried shrimp and ground pork, but the Do Chay version, made in cast iron moulds, holds cabbage, green onions, coconut milk and a couple of lively dipping sauces.
Banh xeo, the Vietnamese crispy crepe at Do Chay Vietnamese restaurant. Photo: Mia Stainsby.
Banh xeo, the extra-large Vietnamese crispy crepe, was another winner with a light and crisp crepe. The ‘xeo’ refers to the sizzle the crepe makes upon hitting the oil in the pan.
Usually the filling includes shrimp and/or pork. This, of course, didn’t but the Ish sauce provided enough umami to more than compensate.
An eggplant dish, heady with an intense aged and fermented black garlic sauce, also had tofu and baby corn braised in the sauce, it sits atop rice which gets a crispy bottom in a clay pot. A topping of greens provides a fresh contrast.
Eggplant with aged and fermented black garlic sauce at Do Chay Vietnamese restaurant. Photo: Mia Stainsby.
Desert Island noodles is the most ordered dish on the menu, and comes with udon-like noodles, coconut milk, vegan “meatballs,” shredded tofu, peanuts, Ish sauce, herbs and greens.
Steamed dumplings with snow peas and jicama filling were nicely made but definitely needed the kick of a sauce.
I didn’t try the pho with a vegetable broth. “It’s tricky balancing the push and pull between sweet and umami. We have to be careful not to go too sweet with the vegetables or too salty,” says Patrick.
The beverage program is unfussy, with three Parallel 49 craft beers on tap and a small selection of house cocktails. A wine list is coming soon.
The cocktails use flavours that pick up on the Asian theme, with ingredients like soju, lemon grass, ginger, coconut, mango, ginseng and grass jelly. The house sangria — called Mother of Dragons and made with white wine — was light and refreshing but lacked the backbone that made Daenerys so formidable.
Do Chay opened in May and has been busy ever since. When we went mid-week there was a lineup of folks outside who thought the food was worth the wait. It’s not a huge room, but still.
The food traditions “all stem back to grandma,” says Patrick. “She has eight kids and ran a bahn mi shop. They all picked up different aspects of her cooking and opened different styles of restaurants.”
That grandma’s down in Houston, Texas, but hey, thank you, you’ve made a difference to Vancouver’s food culture.
The female chefs at Yes Shefs! dinner fundraiser. L to R: Eleanor Chow Waterfall, Meeru Dhalwala, Tia Kambas, Mariana Gabilondo, Andrea Carlson. Photo by Mark Kinskofer
“Tonight, we 86-ed ego,” said Joanna Jagger.
It was at the end of the first Yes Shef! fundraising dinner with five female chefs, five female sommeliers, one female mixologists and five female culinary students as apprentices in the kitchen. It was a beauty of a dinner with wonderfully matched wines.
Jagger founded WORTH (Women of Recreation, Tourism and Hospitality) to empower and advance women in a still sexist hospitality industry.
“Women leave the industry at faster rates than men,” she said at the event. “They’d rather leave than voice that they’ve been harassed or discriminated against.
“You have to imagine early mornings, late nights, blood, sweat and tears, but tears only in the walk-in cooler when no one is looking.”
She said a survey showed men in the industry work for financial rewards whereas women want to be role models.
“Today, we bring together role models. I like to call them the Beyonces of our business.”
On one first day of work at a restaurant Jagger was told by the sous chef that girls can’t handle the work.
“I worked my ass off to show I could and to show I could get promoted,” she said. When she did get promoted, that sous told her “You’re pretty good for a girl.”
At Yes Shef!, star mixologist Lauren Mote started the evening with cocktails. Andrea Carlson (Burdock & Co.), Meeru Dhalwala (Vij’s and Rangoli), Mariana Gabilondo (La Mezcaleria), Tia Kambas (Chambar), and Eleanor Chow Waterfall (Cadeaux Bakery cooked. Sommeliers Jenna Briscoe (Cafe Medina), Maude Renaude-Brisson (independent), Jill Spoor (Fairmont Pacific Rim), Christina Haritgan (Wildebeest), and Kelcie Jones (Chambar) matched food with wine.
The fundraiser was for scholarships for the next generation of women in hospitality.