Two years ago, the corner of Commercial Drive and East 13th Avenue was a tire shop with a parking lot out front.
In October, that same corner starts serving a fancy sixteen-course tasting menu.
The restaurant is Haisan, and it takes the ground-floor unit at 2892 Commercial Drive, inside the new four-storey rental building that went up after Grandview Tire and Auto Centre was demolished in 2023.
Nobody has cooked in that unit before. Haisan gets it first.
Behind it is Steven Che, a chef who locals may know only for making some darn good sourdough pizza.
His pizza resume: the main chef of Wild Flour Pizza Co. in Lougheed, then eventually left to open Just Pizza on Kingsway in the summer of 2024.
But the big part of Steven’s resume is actually in fine dining.
Steven was born in Macau and raised in Vancouver, and he started working in hospitality at thirteen.
He trained at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Oslo and a three-hatted restaurant in Adelaide, took Rising Star Chef of the Year at the 2024 Chinese Restaurant Awards, and won the 2026 Garland Canada Culinary Competition.
For Haisan, he calls the cooking Chinese Pacific Northwest.
“While working at top restaurants in Norway and Australia, I saw chefs showcase their culture and personal history at the highest level, and I wanted to do the very same thing with my own heritage here at home,” Steven says.
The room seats thirty and the menu runs sixteen courses across roughly three hours.
Here is the part worth repeating.
Steven crafts the ceramics himself, so the bowl your course arrives in came off the same pair of hands as the course.
That’s pretty unique if you ask me.
Neither the price of the menu nor an exact opening date has been announced.
It is slated to open this October, though.
Just Pizza is not going anywhere, either.
The Kingsway shop keeps running its monthly features alongside the Cumin Lamb and Filipino Breakfast pies that made its name.
Haisan joins the list of other upcoming Vancouver food spots like Crepe Spot, Danbo Yaletown, and Jersey Mike’s Kitsilano.
For more new and upcoming food spots in Metro Vancouver, take a peek at our tracker here, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
Address: 2892 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC
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