The sign went up in June 2024.
For 26 months, Burnaby locals have patiently waited for this stall to open.
Hei Hei Rice Roll took the Crystal Mall food court unit that Japanese stall Kagusa left behind, put its name over the counter, and then stopped.
Other stalls opened around it and traded through two winters while the gates stayed shut.
That changed in the last week of August.
We walked past the unit and for the first time saw two staff working inside, prepping, with a handwritten notice taped to the folding gates.
The notice reads 请人！！全职厨房, which translates to hiring, full time kitchen.
It lists three jobs: making the rice rolls, with no experience required and training provided, plus assembly and prep. Six days a week, monthly salary.
We asked the Hei Hei team whether they’re ready to open.
They told Noms Magazine that the stall is finally opening the week of August 31, and that they are treating it as a trial run rather than a full on launch.
The entire crew is new, so they will be training people while serving them, and they want to move slowly.
Although the team did share the exact opening day with us, we respected their request not to publish it.
But you’ll be able to find the stall operating sometime this week.
They also explained the two-year gap, which is the part nobody outside the family knew.
The build-out came first.
Then the owner’s wife became pregnant and had the baby, and running an opening was not something anyone had the capacity for.
They planned to open after that, but the owner unfortunately ran into health problems of his own.
The menu is where Burnaby should set expectations.
It will be largely the same as the Richmond original, with one difference the team flagged directly: they won’t have the full congee line up.
Crystal Mall gets only one or two fixed congees instead, so the rice rolls carry the stall on their own.
That is what people are lining up for anyway.
Hei Hei opened in the Richmond Public Market in 2021 and became one of the market’s busiest, with 40 minute waits treated as normal for its stone ground Canton style rice rolls.
The menu there runs around 20 options, including beef, pork and shrimp, black truffle seafood, and mushroom and pork.
Crystal Mall’s food court is about to get even busier.
Hei Hei joins a run of recent openings around Burnaby like One Cafe at Crystal Mall, Memory Corner, and Hungry Tiger.
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Address: Crystal Mall food court, 4500 Kingsway, Burnaby, BC
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