Potluck Hawker Eatery is now open in the Cambie Village area of Vancouver. This is a counter-service style restaurant inspired by the South-East Asian hawker street food markets.
Chef Justin Cheung put his own spin on Malaysian cuisine, paying homage to a comprehensive training of Thai cooking and a nod to a Filipino potluck. It is fantastic and we are all here for it.
Interior
The 993 square-feet restaurant draws inspiration from the ritual of potlucks, where families spend the day in the kitchen preparing their family’s signature dish and contributing to the table – a coming together of stomach-filling, soul-warming dishes. We absolutely love the space and don’t forget to take a selfie in the washroom because it’s amazing. Make sure you go into both washrooms too.
My favourite part is seeing the ingredients that go into the dishes on the walls. its gives it nice character and also transparency in what they cook with.
If anyone blames the smell on you, tell them it’s from the durian wallpaper.
Menu
Thai Iced Tea
One of our favourite drinks and its very nice and refreshing for a summer’s day. Bold tea flavour and they sweeten it with condensed milk. If you want it less sweet, just ask.
Beet Carpaccio
This has spicy fish sauce and lime juice dressing, fried shallots and fresh herbs. You heard that right beet, not beef. It was tangy and refreshing. The chilis give it a nice kick of spice. It really reminded us of butter beef but without the beef or butter.
Burmese Shrimp Ceviche
The dish has cucumber, cherry tomatoes and shrimp lightly pickled in fresh lime juice, fish sauce and chili. Not as flavourful compared to the other dishes but you’ll want to eat this before all the other dishes so the work better together. The shrimp was really nice and fresh in this ceviche.
Salted Egg Yolk Fried Chicken Sando
This beauty has crispy chicken thigh, green mango slaw, tamarind chili jam, in Fife Bakery milk bread. We also got their Malaysian shaker fries as an add-on.
This dish was our favourite. The fried chicken thigh was tender and juicy. It balanced well with the crunchy slaw, salted egg yolk, and jam. The bread was really good, lightly toasted but very soft. The shaker fries has that savoury-sweet flavour combination.
Nasi Goreng
This is an Indonesian style fried rice with house special soy topped with shrimp crackers and fried egg. You can choose to have this with chicken, seafood or tofu. The egg was cooked perfectly to moisten up the fried rice. The rice did end up to be quite moist.
Mama Cheung’s Laksa
This is dish is named after the chef’s mom. It has coconut curry noodle soup with fish cake, prawns, puff tofu, boiled egg and mixed noodle. You can choose to have this with vermicelli or egg noodles. Very flavourful with a kick of spice.
Fish Sauce Caramel Wings
They use free-run Farmcrest chickens from Salmon Arm, BC. It was finger lickin’ good with the pandan infused palm sugar and sesame. Their fried food is exceptional here. The chicken is seasoned as well as the batter so they really get the flavour to shine throughout the wings.
Roti Canai with Condensed Milk
Not the combination that I would have through would work together, but it was simple and tasty. A good way to end the meal.
Final Thoughts
The food at Potluck Hawker Eatery is fantastic and packed with a depth of flavour. The essence of South East Asian cuisine really shines through. A lot of the dishes do use cilantro and spicy peppers, so if you adore that, head on over to Potluck. If you’re not into those flavours, they can accomodate no cilantro and reduced spice levels too. Salted Egg Yolk Fried Chicken Sando is the best.
Highly recommend this place and we just can’t stop thinking about their fried dishes. All so nicely battered and seasoned. Vancouver definitely needed more restaurants like this.
Address:
3424 Cambie St, Vancouver, BC
Website:
https://www.potluckyvr.ca/
