Canadian Chinese cuisine

Many labourers who remained in Canada after the railway's completion opened small inexpensive "Chinese cafés" or worked as cooks in mining and logging camps, canneries, and in the private homes of the upper classes in cities and towns.

These restaurants were often established in small towns and rural areas where residents, predominantly European Canadians, already did not have gathering places of their own, and where the cook/owner could very well be the only Asian person in the community.

In contrast, the United States tended to accept more mainland or Taiwanese Chinese, while imposing immigration quotas on Commonwealth territories such as Hong Kong.

[citation needed] Smaller and more rural settlements in northern regions of the provinces, as well as across the Prairies, tend to feature Chinese restaurants that also specialize in Western cuisine, often relics of when such menus were necessary for business.

One of the largest concentration of Chinese restaurants in North America is in the Golden Village area in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver.

Many Chinese fine dining restaurants and banquet halls offer discounted dim sum lunches on weekdays and early weekends or to seniors, though this is a low margin segment, and their main earnings come from hosting weddings or other functions.

Observers have noted that dim sum "cart service is a dying breed in Toronto, as more and more restaurants have switched over to a list-based dining experience.

There are a few notable places where you can still witness these magical culinary carts being rolled out in front of you; and where you order by using your pointer finger, not a pen and paper.

[12] The Regal Palace chain of four restaurants, owned by Yuk Yee Ellen Pun and Patsy Lai, went bankrupt and ceased operations in 2013 while owing 60 employees $676,000 in unpaid wages.

Her papers have examined the dynamics of localization and "authenticization" of Chinese food in Canada, and its implications for ethnic relations and the culture of consumption.

Aluminum pan pie dishes were previously used until the late 1990s, but fell out of favour due to high costs and environmental concerns.