Number 9: exploring Vancouver's diversity through food

On The Coast's Lisa Christiansen and Jason D'Souza are exploring the diversity of Vancouver through its food.

They're visiting several restaurants, each from a different culture, to find out more about the people who call Vancouver home.

They have only one rule: When they go to these restaurants, they can only order dish number nine off the menu. No exceptions, no questions asked, and no cheating.

It's part of a new series they're calling Number 9.

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To start off their adventure, they went to a street they feel could define Vancouver all on its own: Kingsway.

"Kingsway is easily the strangest street in our whole city," Christiansen said.

"In that stretch of land is a lot of fusion between different religions, different cultures, different ethnicities, both in the residents and the shops that you see," D'Souza added.

And D'Souza says the best example of this fusion could be a restaurant called Green Lettuce, that offers Indian-style Chinese food on the corner of Victoria Drive and Kingsway.

Indian-Chinese-Canadian

The restaurant's owner is Peter Chang. He's fourth-generation Indian, but you might not believe it because his ethnicity is Chinese.

"I call myself Desi-Chinese, Indian-Chinese," Chang said. "We started [Green Lettuce] in 1999. We were the first Indian-style Chinese restaurant here in B.C. That means spices, spices!"

When Chang first came to Canada, it was his dream to create a different kind of Indian and Chinese food to serve the diverse tastes of people who call themselves Indian.

"There are so many Indian people, maybe from Fiji or Bangladesh or Pakistan or India proper. They don't have this kind of food to eat which they're used to in India," he said.

Dish number nine: hot and spicy tofu

At Green Lettuce, dish number nine is hot and spicy tofu. Fried tofu, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. It's cooked with onions, and spices like chili, garlic, salt and pepper.

So what's the verdict from our gregarious gastrophiles?

"It's delicious," Christiansen said (with her mouth full).

"Have you ever had food that tasted quite like that before?" D'Souza asked.

"Never. No, I haven't."

"That's the best part of this fusion, you can really taste the two elements," D'Souza said. "The tofu obviously represents the Chinese, but that kick, there's that really Indian kick in there."

"Definitely."

Tune into On The Coast all this week for more delicious cultural explorations from Lisa Christiansen and Jason D'Souza.

To hear the full story, click the audio labelled: Number 9: new series explores diversity — through food