Eating Our Way Through The Olympics: Part 1

A few weeks ago Emi and I got the chance of a lifetime to go up to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We went up with a group of friends to experience the Olympic festivities and of course to eat our way through British Columbia.

We stayed in Richmond which is a suburb outside of Vancouver. Basically it's Hong Kong Jr. The city is filled with Chinese people and with Chinese people comes Armani Exchange and great Chinese food. Not being big A/E fans we decided to focus on the food.

Emi ready to hit up the Olympics in her red, white, and blue gear

We got into Richmond around midnight and after hanging out with everyone at Calvin's condo, Pert got one his infamous late night cravings. So of course we decided to go find some late night Chinese food. We ended up finding a 24 hour Chinese restaurant that was still packed at 3am!

Garlic string beans with pork

Udon noodle stir fry. The Japanese udon noodles went great with this dish.

Chinese salt and pepper, garlic fried chicken, mmm mmm delicious, especially at 3am

Salted fish fried rice. I've never had salted fish before and by itself it might be too strong, but in combination with the fried rice it was amazing.

In general I couldn't think of a better way to start off the trip than with a Chinese, family style shared late night dinner with friends.


After sleeping off our late night Chinese food hangover we woke up and took the SkyTrain into downtown Vancouver to check out the Olympic Village. After walking around for awhile, we worked up quite the hunger so were lucky to fall upon a few food vendors for lunch.

Pert and I shared some cheap dim sum: shumai (pork balls), hau gau (shrimp balls), and some hum baos. Basically we got what we paid for.

One of the stranger foods I witnessed in Canada. Hurricane French Fries, "the new model of french fry". Basically it was a whole potato deep fried on a stick. None of us tried it, but I needed a photo of this bizarre snack.

Ali's chocolate, banana crepe, lunch of champions

Emi's friend, Katie and her bubble cake, Emi tried it and described it as sweet and crunchy

After perusing all of the vendors, I found someone making takoyaki. Takoyaki is a popular Japanese dumpling made of batter, pickled ginger, green onion, and tako also known as octopus. I was definitely excited to try out a cool Japanese snack, but things went sour quickly when I found out the two guys running the stand were from Hong Kong and the first thing the guy said to me was "I'm slow".

At least he was honest, it took him about 20 minutes to make 6 of these things for me which is outrageous because in Japan they crank these things out like hot cakes!

The finished product. After they cook up, they add on okonomiyaki sauce which is made up of ponzu, sweet mayonnaise, and bonita flakes (dried fish). It ended up being really good. Takoyaki is best served piping hot, so hot most people usually burn their tongues enjoying the sweet, doughy, chewy octopus balls.

After lunch we headed to Subeez Cafe in downtown Vancouver. Katie works there and hooked us up with a cool table and suggested we order some buckets of Whistler beer to enjoy before the Czech Republic vs Latvia hockey game. Katie thanks for the great recommendation!

Even though we were only in Canada from Thursday night through Saturday morning we ate so much that I'm going to have to split up a recap of our trip into three separate blog posts. Next up will be a post about Japa Dog.

- Kyle

ps - I messed up the timing of the posts, so read on below for Part 2 about Japa Dog.