May Chau is dressed in a chef jacket, a uniform she’s abundantly familiar with. The 55-year-old Richmond woman is seated at one of her restaurant’s empty tables — it’s late afternoon, between lunch and dinner service — describing what she does on Tuesdays, her only day off each week.
“I have to prepare for the following business day. I’m buying supplies for the restaurant,” she says through translator and son Wayne Au, 25. “I’m trying to think of new dishes, come up with new ideas for food.”
Chau, chef and owner of Golden Paramount Seafood Restaurant in Richmond’s City Centre, is used to it. Growing up in Hong Kong, Chau spent much of her time in her grandfather’s restaurant, where her parents worked.
It was there she developed her interest and skills in preparing traditional dim sum, a Cantonese cuisine of bite-sized portions known around the world. At age 14, she began working in the restaurant, serving as assistant to the dim sum chef while also cooking in the kitchen’s dinner area. As her training advanced, she began taking on more responsibilities.
Eventually, her family decided to sell the restaurant. It was a business that likely would have been kept in the family, but her parents sought greater stability. They were ready to move to a new country and start a new life.
Chau arrived in Canada in 1980. Living in Vancouver at first, she found a job through her sister-in-law — not cooking, but sewing. It paid the bills but the kitchen soon called her back.
Within three years she found a job at a Chinese restaurant and returned to the world of dumplings, rolls and cakes. In 2007, she finally realized her dream of having her own restaurant, opening the 90-seat Golden Paramount where her kitchen is focused on staying true to the traditions of dim sum.
“By having my own restaurant I not only have control over the dim sum section, but I can also monitor the dinner section. I can have an eye on the production, the quality of the food,” she said. “If it’s not my restaurant, I can’t say anything about it. I want to have my own kind of style.”
Chau’s restaurant is known for dim sum and its signature award-winning menu item: steamed dumpling with crab and pork. Preparing it and others like it is time-consuming, but she insists on staying true to each dish. Exceptions aren’t made to a recipe — despite the current high price of crab, for example — and ingredients are cut by hand, not machine.
“This is the way to produce the best quality dim sum you can imagine,” she said. “Keeping the quality high is the main objective of having my own restaurant.”
Running a restaurant is no picnic. Her workdays last at least 10 hours, and are split in two to cover both lunch and dinner. Restaurateurs like Chau also face the pressure of filling seats in a city known for its high number of restaurants.
“The number of people eating dim sum is considerably smaller compared to Asia, where Chinese people go to dim sum every morning, and dinner maybe three times a week. Here it’s not so much.”
It’s also hard work. That’s why Chau figures her two children aren’t following her into the business she grew up with. That’s “quite a disappointment,” said Chau, who can’t imagine doing anything else.
“This is my lifestyle. Food is everything I have.”
