Meet the Asian-Canadian chefs shaking up Vancouver's dining scene

In downtown Vancouver, at the Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar, executive chef Alex Chen is prepping one of the night's star dishes: roasted sablefish with flan, beech mushrooms, coconut rice and lemongrass vinaigrette.

In Kitsilano, the western suburb known affectionately to locals as "Kits", chef and owner Curtis Luk hovers over his crew at the newly opened Mission, ensuring the tasting-menu dish Humboldt squid with bagna cauda comes out exactly as it should.

On the outskirts of the city, hungry millennials are being introduced to bold flavours from the East made with produce from the Canadian west coast at Torafuku. Ahead of the dinner rush, chef Clement Chan works tirelessly on a ham hock terrine that is to be served with crispy bacon fried rice, pickled cherry tomatoes and parmesan cheese.

Montreal may have a reputation as Canada's culinary capital, but Vancouver is beginning to give Quebec's most populous city a run for its money. And much of the credit must go to a wave of Asian-Canadian chefs.

That Asian chefs are at the forefront of culinary developments in the city should perhaps come as no surprise; 28 per cent of Vancouver's 2.5 million people are ethnically Chinese and authentic Japanese street food, Taiwanese beef noodles and Korean stews can be found on street corners all over town.

Their peers in the United States - David Chang in New York, Danny Bowien in California and Edward Lee in Kentucky, for example - have been changing the way North Americans think of Asian food for some time and Canadians are hungry to follow suit. Whether it is demystifying Korean barbecue, educating people on the food culture and habits of the Chinese or simply putting an end to the likes of lemon chicken doused in a sticky, sugary syrup, Vancouver's young guns are reinventing both their careers and Asian flavours with flare and ambition.