Northern Café Is Proud to Be a Restaurant in the Middle of Nowhere
The award-winning breakfast spot is always buzzy, despite its remote location in a South Vancouver lumber yard.
“Hidden gem” has become a culinary buzzword—and, by nature, real hidden gems seldom get any hype. Once a restaurant has been around for decades, won awards, and gone viral on TikTok, can it really be called hidden at all?
Northern Café can—largely due to its literal location. Getting to this restaurant requires a drive to East Kent Avenue, at the very edge of South Vancouver (if you hit the Fraser River, you’ve gone too far—but just barely). Pull over to the road’s gravel shoulder and follow hand-painted signs assuring you that yes, you’re in the right place, until you reach the uneven staircase that leads up to the restaurant. Don’t mind the huffing engines of lumber trucks or forklifts chugging by. For the employees of Northern Building Supply, watching foodies find this restaurant could be a spectator sport.
The café first opened in 1949 as the lumberyard’s lunchroom. Richard Mah, whose family has owned Northern Café since 2008, explains that his parents, Jimmy and Connie—who emigrated from Hong Kong to B.C. by way of Saskatchewan and ran several restaurants in the Canadian Prairies—took it over in their “retirement.” (The two are hardly retired—diners can still see Jimmy hand-pressing hamburgers and Connie sealing won tons behind the counter daily). “He built his life around the restaurant business,” Richard says of his father, “and I think after he retired, he got bored.”
There’s no antidote to boredom quite like serving fluffy pancakes, eggs benny, gyoza, and burgers to some of Vancouver’s most dedicated diners. “Our little café was built by regulars who kept showing up,” Richard says, acknowledging that the space itself is “very hard to find.” While the restaurant has always had its devoted fans, the clientele is growing thanks to social media. Viral videos of Northern Café, with its charming checkerboard floor, mismatched cutlery, and fascinating if-you-know-you-know location are popping up all over Instagram and TikTok. “It helps with awareness and has definitely brought a lot of new faces and a lot of attention we never expected,” Richard says.
Still, internet virality is hardly a goal of the Mah family—the focus remains on the food. Raymond Mah, Richard’s brother, runs the Northern Café kitchen. Chef Raymond’s background in restaurants (his resumé includes sous chef at Boulevard and executive chef for the Hard Rock Casino) makes him perfectly suited for the family biz. His menu offers North American classics like pancakes, french toast, and cheeseburgers as well as Asian comfort food including won tons, gyoza, and egg noodle soup. If you’ve never had a pancake and a wonton in the same sitting, you haven’t properly lived—and notably, if a pancake and wontons is what you’re after, you’re in for a very affordable meal.
The food is so good, in fact, that in May the restaurant won Best Brunch at the Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards. It’s a people’s choice award, so the win was thanks to a public vote, and other competitors in the category leaned more upscale: restaurants that serve seafood crepes with velouté and Provençal roasted tomatoes rather than breakfast poutine. “The award was, to be honest, a little shocking,” Richard says (during the ceremony, he, Raymond and his staff let out a collective whoop of surprise that prompted supportive laughter from the audience). “When they announced Northern Café as the winner, I was in the clouds,” Richard recalls. “I had no idea that this could happen to a small diner in the south of Vancouver that is so hard to find…. It’s a fairytale story.”
On a Friday morning at 9 a.m., the restaurant is packed, with a line that stretches down the hallway—on weekends, it can snake down the stairs and into the lumberyard itself. Despite being an inconvenient commute for all (except, of course, for the lumber workers who are lucky enough to call it their on-site restaurant), the red leather booths remain full, and the Mah family remains honoured to serve every patron. “There’s a lot of restaurants out there that are very polished and very perfect, and that’s not us,” Richard admits. “The thing, for us, is we’ve got soul.”
