Up until recently Korean restaurants on the North tip of Vancouver Island tend to land in one of two buckets: First and most plentiful are the Korean-owned Japanese-style restaurants that serve sushi, sashimi, noodles and are always identifiable by the addition of kimchi with their agadashi tofu. Second in minority are the Jjigae joints serving homestyle ramen stews that are a revelation when eaten in house and tend to suffer greatly if subjected to door dash.
Created by the same crew that ran a couple aforementioned-style restaurants in the past, Nanaimo’s Horang is proudly Korean (there are lots of double consonants on this menu) but also includes lots of nods to the Japanese-Korean fusion that made fish-pickled cabbage downright trendy when a lot of Canadians still thought tofu and seaweed was exotic. Also, they will slap cheese on anything!
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If you’ve ever been to a real Chinese market, have a Chinatown near you, or hell… If you’ve been to China you’ve seen and hopefully tasted Siu Mei in all of its barbecued, glistening glory. It’s a take-out tradition that goes back to Guangzhou in the days when every neighbourhood had a local “oven master” that would roast various animals in special sauce to perfection and sell them to their neighbours to eat with a bit of rice and pickles. 