East River Seafood Restaurant

They use to heavily advertise their lobster on rice dish for dinner… for $ 23~ i believe but recently i went back and when i looked at the bill, they charged me $ 28. When I went to ask if they charged wrong, the owner flat out just started complaining. He said he doesn’t even want to make this dish too cause he’s losing money and demanded that we pay $ 28 for it. This is totally false advertising so beware!!!

East River Seafood 東江海鮮酒家 is a Chinese restaurant that has been opened for ages. Reasonable prices with ridiculously limited street parking for all businesses along Kingsway and Knight Street. This area is home to old Chinese immigrants and second generations who have grown up here.
Service here is well ‘what service’? Wave down a server if you are lucky. But there is a decent selection on the menu and the quality of dim sum is slightly above average.
Braised Pork Belly Preserved Vegetables 梅菜扣肉: A hearty dish perfect for the winter months. Fatty pork belly cooked till it is soft. Ample fat melts in your mouth. Perfect to go along with some jasmine white rice!
Gui Fei Chicken貴妃鶏: wine marinated chicken with lychees. This chicken is a good alternative to soya chicken or salt baked chicken that we frequently order.
Braised halibut with soya sauce: flash fried halibut fish and then tossed in dark soy, scallions and ginger.
Deep-​fried Bean Curd Rolls 干炸响铃: Deep fried bean curd rolls with Chinese mushrooms and enoki mushrooms oyster sauce. This is everyone’s favorite especially with the elderly. Served with seasonal vegetables
Snow Pea Tips: Stir fried with garlic and layered with dried scallops.

Local favorite, always packed when I come for Dim Sum on the weekends. Nothing fancy, inexpensive but good piping hot old school Dim Sum. Good variety of items to choose from.

A nice casual dim sum spot, nothing fancy, but solid enough.
Pork Buns;
I liked this style with the sugary Mexican bread type thing that had going on. A nice way to carb up.
Beefy Rolled Noodle Thing;
Very tender beef with a very nice sauce. I’ve never been a fan of the rolled noodle guys because in the rolled form, the noodle is not taking advantage of its full surface area to capture the sauce.
Chicken Feet;
Not sure what they were coated in but these were some of the better feet I’ve put in my mouth. Loads of nice gelatinous goodness thoughout.
Intestine;
Goddamn that was some good offal. Super melty and served piping hot.
Shumai;
Par but nice.
Fried Shrimp Roll Thing;
Fried, crispy, and full of shrimp bits, what more do you want?
Cake Thing;
Not nearly as good as it looks. The cake was dry, the other layers were not creamy, and it was not what I expected.
Overall, solid. Not the spot you go to for the words finest XLBs, but with next to no wait on a weekend it was a nice meal.

This is place is definitely better than its competitor a few doors down.
Having eaten in both restaurants within a week for dim sum, I can gladly say this one is better.
The service was great and useful, the food came out relatively quickly and it tasted great too.
Prices for dim sum are 2.95 for S, M, L and 3.5 for XL.
This will definitely be my go to dim sum place.

There are two dim sum places within a few doors from one another, and I would recommend this one over the other.
Let me preface this by saying, when I go out for dim sum, I go for the standards; the har gow, char siu bao, etc. I love my dumplings, and this place has some of the best (for the price, for sure). $ 2.50 dim sum, within walking distance of my parents’ house? OH My.
Service and atmosphere are standard old-​school Vancouver dimsum; my favourite.

This isn’t the high-​falutin dimsum you’re going to find in the nicer restos in Richmond or downtown.
This is the old-​skool, just-​like-​gramma-​used-​to-​feed-​ya dim sum of your youth. Less greasy than the competition next door, and a wee bit more expensive (but still def qualifies as inexpensive). Service is quick and business-​like, par for the course.
There’s a really good selection of vegetable dishes. I was able to take my vegetarian/​pescatarian friend here without too much trouble at all.
I go there quite often so here are some of the faves:
Shrimp and veggie steamed dumplings and shrimp steamed dumplings are thin skinned, well steamed and stuffed full of shrimp with a good snappy texture.
Siu mai are large and porky in flavour. Shrimp spring rolls are pretty delicious.
The stir fried radish cake in XO sauce is absolutely addictive — my spouse devours the entire dish alone! Can’t go wrong with any of their rice rolls. The chicken claypot rice is a good deal and tasty.
If you like desserts, try the dessert pumpkin stuffed with taro paste. It’s fried and sweet and crispy and shaped like cute little pumpkins. Delicious, even for taro haters in the group!
We were all stuffed and paid under $ 11 each, including tip.
If you’re not Chinese, you may be only Non-​Asians in the establishment. Just bring a group of friends to entertain you or watch the sports on the tvs, and enjoy delicious and cheap chinese delectables!
Tips:
1. Chili sauce and chili oil make everything better. ask for both!
2. Bring cash. Just do.

I chose to try them out with the compliment by a friend. I and my 2 other friends enjoyed the food very much. We ordered 3 dishes (ginger & union lobster & crab with noodles on the side; mutton & dried-​tofu hot pot; green bean sprouts with dried scallop broth) and we were all full stomach plus a couple of doggie bags to take home. Food is excellent and the price is reasonable (all 3 dish + soup of the day + 3 rice + dessert = $ 73.50 tax incl.) Service is great (changed our plates many times). Dining room is clean. Men’s room is not bad. The front entrance a bit small but I think most Chinese restaurants are like that. Not like most restaurants, I didn’t feel thirsty at all after the meal. My friend told me they do not use msg. I believe it.

Kingsway is awesome for the sheer number of restraurants all the way between Main and Nanaimo. I noticed this place while eating at Kam Wah Loong next door and decided to give this place a go today.
Parking is actually not the best. You have to circle the streets quite a bit. There is a small lot out in the back of the restaurant, but it was completely full. Be careful not to curb your wheels or scrape up your bumper on the way in. There’s a weird concrete island.
The front door doesn’t really look like a front door. I had to do a double take as I thought it was some patio opening.
The inside looks much bigger than it really is thanks to the large mirrors on the side of the dining area. There was a steady stream of people lined up over the course of our lunch. They did try to rush us a bit at the beginning, but that was understandable as I’m sure they wanted to crank up the turnover. There were a couple of TVs showing the news.
The food was your typical mediocre East Side fare. Ghetto and tasty. Dishes here (S, M, L) are $ 2.75 each.
2 things of note here:
1) There is no «regular» turnip cake. The only option we could find was the «XO-​infused» one, for $ 5.25. This one is chopped up in small cubes, much like agadeshi tofu.
2) The one dish that really stuck out in a unique way was their «ginger and shrimp» spring roll (they have regular shrimp ones too). They slip a couple slivers of gari (the pink ginger you find with your sushi) in there, which gives it a very unique kick. I have never seen this dish anywhere else.
If you don’t want to fight the hordes of seniors at Kam Wah Loong, this is a nice easy alternative.

Came here for a family gathering. Portion sizes were good and food came fast. We ordered from the wo choy menu and got 8 dishes plus soup and dessert for ~$ 97. I thought the food was good. I didn’t hear any complaints from my family members either. Also, I wasn’t dying of thirst later, which was a bonus!

Yet another cheap $ 2.50 dim sum joint on Kingsway (near Clark) — but quality is poor.
Came here for the weekly family dim sum as my mom and aunts wanted to try out the dim sum here after having an enjoyable dinner here. The place is pretty new and started serving dim sum in January after being an initial run of being being open for dinner only. The interior is nicer than the storefront would lead you to believe and looks like it was converted from an old Italian restaurant. It was pretty busy for a weekday morning in the cramped interior and I suspect the allure of cheap dim sum in a new joint resulted in the short lineups.
This place works off the now-​typical order sheet system (about fourty $ 2.50 items and other kitchen specials on the large menu) — so the variety is pretty good.
Service was subpar as we the servers were slow on refilling the tea pots. Also, the dishes slowly trickled out of the kitchen. For the first 15 minutes or so, we only had one plate on the table at a time until all our remaining orders came at once.
Unfortunately, the dim sum was a pretty big letdown — the hyped-​up durian pastry was extremely sweet (tasted like mooncakes) and not as flaky as competitors in the area. The siu mai and steamed beef balls were really salty — had to guzzle down tea to wash the taste out of my mouth. Everyone seemed to like the rice rolls, but I thought it was overly dry. Overall, the dim sum wasn’t very good — especially when considering the fierce cheap dim sum competition in the area.
For six people, the bill was only $ 45 (there was an additional 10% off opening promotion). Wicked cheap — but still I still have a lingering oversalted taste in my mouth. If you’re looking for value dim sum, there are better places in the same area (i.e. Dai Tung) — so it may do well as a dim sum run-​off joint (i.e. if the lineup is too long elsewhere, people walk down here). But I would probably avoid going here specifically for dim sum.