Lucky Joy BBQ

It has been a while, yes? Thought I would never return, yes? Well I am back, at least for a while - not sure whether that is a good or bad thing but hey, I have tried some really good places lately and thought I'd share by bombarding my readers with blocks and blocks of text about food. Too much to read? Print it out and take it to the washroom - if you know what I mean. I'm just kidding.

Having watched a lot of Diners, Drive-ins and, Dives episodes lately, Lucky Joy BBQ is what I would call a dive. It is a hidden little gem between Cambie and No. 5 road in Richmond. From the outside, it isn't really appealing - neither is the decor inside - but hey, we're not here to admire the... I actually don't remember much about the decor besides the pink plastic they used to protect the table. But anyway, the food.

Lucky Joy serves traditional Chinese style dinners as well as HK style cafe food. Depending on which dinner option you choose, you get some complementary dishes. Dinner for two-three came with soup, rice, dessert and chicken wings where as dinner for four and above gets a complementary choice of crab, lobster, or chicken - I believe. Correct me if I am wrong. Of course, the prices also differs between the meals. B, K, E, and I came for dinner and ordered the Dinner-for-four option because we really wanted crab. For our four dishes, we chose: sweet sticky spare ribs, beef brisket and daikon hotpot, salt and pepper tofu, green beans stir fried with preserved fish and black beans, and our crab was stir fried with green onion and ginger on top of a bed of Yee-mein (additional $3.00). Please note that these are not the exact names on the menu; we ordered in Chinese and I have no clue what the English translation for it is on the menu.

Soup and crab were the first dishes served. The soup was a standard chinese soup; meat and vegetables. It had a lot of flavor, but I think it was just MSG because I got really thirsty afterwards. The Crab was deep-fried first before being stir-fried with the green onion and ginger sauce. The meat was fluffy and the sauce was a good complimented to the crab. My favourite dish of all time from Chinese restaurants has got to be sweet and sticky spare ribs and personally, I think Lucky Joy does it really, really, really well. The spare ribs were deep-fried to perfection and then coated with the sweet and sticky sauce. Not too sweet and not too salty. There was plenty of juicy meat on the bones and the outside was still crunchy despite the sauce. The salt and pepper tofu was great as well. Crispy outside with smooth tofu on the inside, perfectly seasoned to my tastes. The best part of the green beans was that they were crisp, not soggy - one of my biggest food related pet peeves are soggy, limp, green beans. There was also a good amount of black beans as well as chunks of preserved fish. The dish that I probably will not order again will be the beef brisket. Aside from the beef brisket not being soft like it should be, it was seasoned differently that I was accustomed to - a bit too strong in my opinion. B really liked it though, so like everything else, it is just a matter of tastes. After two bowls of rice and almost the whole plate of ribs, I was stuffed to the brim and only managed a few spoonfuls of the dessert: "eight treasure sweet soup". It was a bit watery - kind of like watered down red bean soup with red rice but it wasn't too sweet and made a very nice palate cleanser.

At the end of the meal, we still had tons of food left over. All together, this dinner came to be around $80, or $20 a person - not bad considering the amount of food we had would serve 5-6 comfortably.