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Lucky Dim Sum Submitted by: lsr
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Our first morning in Vancouver, Scott and I took the “scenic” route to Chinatown from Commercial Drive by walking down E. Hastings Street, the strip notoriously known as Vancouver’s seediest. It wasn’t so bad in the sunny light of day, just hot and long, made more tedious by the nagging grumbling of our stomachs. We craved dim sum, but found our destination—longtime local favorite Park Lock—unfortunately shuttered. A Chinese man on the street pointed us to another restaurant. The BBQ pork buns and Shanghai dumplings were fair enough, but the serendipity of the moment didn’t reveal itself until the end of our meal, when we spoke to the couple next to us: “That looks good, what is that?” Casual conversation ensued. When they learned we were travelers and loved food, the two grinned widely: They were local foodies of the you-must-eat-here variety, the founders of a regionally popular food blog (Foodists.ca) in fact, and they had a lot of opinions about where we should eat. We left that restaurant with an excitedly hand-scribbled map, a too-long list of restaurants to try in too few days, and the confidence that we wouldn’t have one bad meal in Vancouver (we didn’t). A week later, following a heroic last-ditch effort involving a post-dinner sushi roll en route to the airport, we came very close to finishing that list…but, hey, there’s always next time.