Heritage Asian Eatery: Mother’s Day takeout from Vancouver
Heritage Asian Eatery is a casual, counter-service restaurant that features a menu of Far-East flavours prepared with locally sourced ingredients. They specialize in Asian comfort foods with a modern twist. They have 2 locations in Vancouver – one in downtown and one by Mount Pleasant.
Their signature dishes are these bowls (ex. pork belly bowl, shitake mushroom bowl), but this review will be based on their special 2020 Mother’s Day menu.
Mother’s day takeout menu
Since 2020 Mother’s Day is happening during covid-19, I researched special mothers day takeout menus. My parents are quite picky about food from a health perspective, so I can never order anything that is too fatty/unhealty/salty/sweet.
Heritage Asian Eatery’s 2020 mother’s day costs $88 and feeds 4 people. It includes:
- Peking duck with steamed buns OR heritage chicken with rice
- 5 Spice wings
- Truffle siu mai (4 pieces)
- Chilli wontons (8 pieces)
- Eggplant
- Gai Lan
- Spring rolls (4 pieces)
- Salted egg yolk bun (4 pieces)
Heritage chicken with rice
I choose the heritage chicken with rice only due to my parent’s health. Peking duck can be quite fatty but if I was ordering this for myself, I would choose Peking duck 100%. They provide shrimp chips as a pairing, which is usually common for peking duck but not for chicken.
What actually is heritage chicken? Heritage chicken is fried so the skin is supposed to be crispy with the meat juicy. It is a Chinese style fried chicken dish.
I was surprised at how much chicken they give you. I had to carry the platter of chicken separately from the bag of all the other dishes and chicken grease got on my T-shirt lol oh well. They really give you a whole chicken and it smelled sooo good.
The chicken was flavourful and certainly very juicy but I found the skin wasn’t as crispy as other heritage chicken dishes I’ve eaten at restaurants. This is most likely due to the takeout time/process. Some dishes just don’t taste as good when it’s takeout and this is probably one of them. Shrimp chips were not soggy or soaked in grease as they were packaged separately.
+ lots of rice lol
5 Spice wings
More chicken! Heritage Asian Eatery’s 5 spice wings are gluten free chicken wings with five spice dry rub. They are crispier than the heritage chicken and not spicy at all. Generally, they are decent wings. Only complaint is that it would taste even better if it was hot and not just warm (another takeout factor).
Truffle siu mai + spring rolls
Siu Mai is a type of traditional Chinese dumpling usually filled with pork or shrimp. It is a very popular dim sum dish. I wanted to keep my expectations low for the truffle siu mai because Heritage Asian Eatery is not a dim sum restaurant. Also sometimes I feel like restaurants add truffle just to make a normal thing seem exponentially better.
The truffle siu mai was so good lol. Not just because of the truffle! The siu mai was big and stuffed with lots of fillings. Very juicy and still warm – an explosion in your mouth!
The spring rolls were not super crispy but still a crunch when you bite into it. I was surprised that the inside of the spring roll was filled with char siu (bbq meat). Usually, spring rolls have vermicelli, veggies or shrimp.
Chilli wontons
So these babies pack quite a bit of spice, which unfortunately, is too much for me because I’m a mild kinda girl. Heritage Asian Eatery’s wontons are made of prawn and pork with chili and vinegar.
If you like spicy, you’ll enjoy these a lot more. The texture and size of these wontons are amazing though. Like the siu mai, super stuffed with fillings.
Marinated eggplant
I’ve really started to like eggplant! This eggplant dish has crispy onions with a ginger, soy & vinegar dressing. The eggplants are cooked through so it’s soft and chewy.
I found their dressing to be a bit too sour and overpowering. If I eat it with rice it’s not as bad.
Gai lan
Think of gai lan as Chinese broccoli. It looks nothing like broccoli but to us, it is like broccoli in the sense that it is a staple green vegetable. It is a leaf vegetable with thick, flat, glossy blue-green leaves with thick stems. We usually eat it with oyster sauce.
Heritage Asian Eatery’s gai lan is steamed with crispy garlic and sauce. The garlic is not crispy (due to takeout) but the gai lan tastes like your standard authentic Chinese gai lan dish.
Salted egg yolk bun
For dessert, we have salted egg yolk buns. This may not sound like a dessert, but these buns are actually sweet!
Salted egg yolk seems to be a very trendy flavour nowadays. I highly recommend any salted egg yolk cookies/biscuits you can find at your local T&T supermarket.
The buns are small but have a salted (but is actually sweet…) egg yolk filling. The buns are more dry/pastry texture than usual dimsum baos but it is a nice little thing to pop into your mouth.
Final thoughts
We enjoyed our mothers day meal from Heritage Asian Eatery. This combo is definitely a bang for your buck – $88 for all these dishes + a whole chicken! Their menu said this feeds 4 people but I think it’s more like 6 people. We have a lot of leftovers but the good thing about Chinese food is that leftovers usually taste fine.
I did have to pickup my order from their Broadway location so that was sort of inconvenient but this is what I get for not living in the heart of Vancouver. A big plus is that the pick up procedure was simple, fast and easy. No line-ups, they were practicing proper social distancing measures and the service was friendly.
Takeout definitely diminishes the quality of the food. After picking up my order, there was at least another 20 minutes before we were ready to sit down and eat the food. By then, the food was still warm but nothing was hot. Some things had become soggy (ex. the crispy garlic), but generally, everything stayed together quite well and this is because Heritage Asian Eatery prepared the meal according to your pick up time. In this sense, they did their due diligence to try to make the food as fresh as they can for your pick up.
In conclusion, we still really liked the food and the value of the mother’s day special (Asian moms care about a good deal! lol). My thoughts on takeout affecting food quality is not just for Heritage Asian Eatery, but for all restaurants. I highly recommend you checking out their takeout if you live closer and definitely to check them out when they re-open after covid-19.
Sincerely, Loewe