Inside a glass-walled noodle house, the bustle of Vancouver’s lunch crowd is thrown out of focus by the clouds of steam coming off a new stove.
Trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York, An staged at a number of Michelin-starred restaurants before returning to Vancouver in 2006. He has been among the early adopters of a farm-to-table model, incorporating his own community garden, local produce and sustainable seafood into his menus.
That necessity carried over to the second Fat Mao location, which opened in 2022, and also now runs on 100 per cent induction stoves. The technology has worked especially well for the two noodle houses, where chefs braise meats and boil soup stocks at consistent temperatures for hours on end. “There are technologies that are getting better where you can take your pan off maybe half an inch and it’ll still work,” An said. “But half an inch is not easy to move.”Another barrier is cost. An saved money by buying induction ranges at his two noodle houses because instead of buying a grease ventilation system, he only needed to install a steam hood that costs tens of thousands of dollars less.
When a food writer came in to Vij’s, Dhalwala said she remembers feeling “very pleased with the recipe.” Dhalwala, who now also sits on the advisory board of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems, says it’s been a constant process of learning ever since. Whether it’s sourcing meat from farms that practice sustainable animal husbandry or buying vegetables from producers of regenerative organic produce.