Three original trailers will land on Instagram before anybody eats anything.
That is the setup for The Fishy Business, a two-day seafood pop-up in Vancouver Chinatown built to look and move like a Hong Kong crime film.
It runs Saturday August 8 from 11am to 7pm and Sunday August 9 from 11am to 5pm, on the 500 block of Columbia Street, as part of Hawkers Lane at the Light Up Chinatown festival.
Admission is free and the food is pay as you go.
The people behind it are the reason to take the concept seriously.
Holy Duck Chili is presenting, in collaboration with EatFish and Chef Dez Lo, the Top Chef Canada runner-up.
The same three ran a sold-out GOOD JOOK Congee Bar earlier this year.
The menu is three dishes and nothing else.
Typhoon Shelter Sum Sum Fish and Chips comes with a Hong Kong curry tartar sauce at $15.
Takoyaki with a chili lava salted egg hoisin glaze and bonito is $10. BC smoked fish cakes with a spot prawn chili oil spicy mayo is $10.
All of it is built on sustainable BC seafood run through Hong Kong flavours.
The typhoon shelter reference is the tell for anyone who knows the cuisine.
It points at Hong Kong’s fishing communities, where seafood, fried garlic, chili and fermented savouriness turned practical resourcefulness into a flavour profile of its own.
“In Hong Kong, street food is never just about eating on the street,” says Louise Pang, co-founder of Holy Duck Chili.
“It is what you grab when you are late, broke, tired, hungry, alone, excited, heartbroken or just needing five minutes to yourself.”
The cinema half is not decoration either.
The concept takes its cues from Hong Kong crime films, naming John Woo’s Hard Boiled from 1992 and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs from 2002, the undercover-cop thriller that later became The Departed.
“Food has always been my favourite storytelling medium,” says Chef Dez Lo.
The visual identity comes from Dorothy Tsang, the Hong Kong artist behind Holy Duck Chili’s duck illustrations, which sit on jars in more than 100 stores across Canada.
Tsang has also worked in art direction on Hong Kong film projects, including the 2022 crime thriller Detective vs. Sleuths, and built a world here that lands somewhere between a Chinatown restaurant, a detective archive and film pastiche.
Case files, props and set details are part of it.
The animated campaign visuals came from Vancouver-based Mark Yuen Visuals, whose work draws on Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.
The Fishy Business joins a run of food happening at Light Up Chinatown, with Hawkers Lane running both days on the same block.
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Address: 500 block of Columbia Street, Vancouver BC