Oyster Pancake & Ba Wan @ Sunway Restaurant & Super Wok

No, that's not a typo. Sunway Restaurant is a Taiwanese restaurant in Richmond's Empire Centre (that's the mall next to Parker Place).  In Chinese, it's called 三味食堂 which actually sounds like "Sunway" when spoken in Mandarin.

After several recommendations while on the hunt for Taiwanese beef noodle, I gave Sunway Restaurant a try.  Being a fairly tiny restaurant, the place was packed when I went in for lunch on a Sunday afternoon.  It wasn't until 20 minutes until the first dish arrived though, which we were disappointed in.

We ordered the deluxe beef noodle soup ($8.50) to share; originally we were going to go for the plain Taiwanese beef noodle, but this one was a recommended item! Instead of just the typical beef shank, this had some different parts too, like stomach and tendon.  The stomach and shank were alright, but I thought the tendon was quite soft.  The soup was quite flavourful with lots of star anise.  It did get a bit saltier as I ate though.

One of the items that was marked as their chef's special was their oyster pancake (蚵仔煎, $6.50) which I was curious about.  This was totally different from the Chiuchow style oyster pancake (煎蠔餅) which is very eggy and full of oysters.  Instead, the Taiwanese-style is chewy and has a gelatinous texture to it.  The chopped bits of oysters inside were quite fishy and not that good though.  

The pancake overall reminds me of the ba wan I tried at Super Wok:

Ba Wan from Super Wok

A few weeks back I tried the ba wan (肉圓, $4) from Super Wok and that was the only thing I tried, so it didn't really warrant its own post.  It was my first time trying ba wan and it was really interesting.  Same gelatinous texture as the pancake above and same sweet sauce! I didn't love it but it was alright.  I kind of feel like ba wan will grow on me if I give it more chances.

Sunway Restaurant 三味食堂
1300 - 4540 No. 3 Road
Richmond, BC
(778) 297-4363


Super Wok
505 Dunsmuir Street
Vancouver, BC
(604) 569-2558