Chinese Restaurant Awards 2011 ? Critics Choice Winners Announced

Of all the restaurant awards that are out there, there is only one that I am personally interested in. I have great respect for the awards that the Chinese Restaurant Awards (the CRA) give out, particularly the awards known as the ?Critics Choice?. I particularly like this award because this is awarded by a panel of the best food experts in Vancouver and they identify the best of Chinese DISHES of the year, as opposed to best Chinese restaurant.

Suanne and I had a great time with the last year?s CRA 2010 Critics Choice Award list. We went to try most of the winning dishes over the course of a few months. We summarized all of the 2010 award winning signature dishes in this blog post. You really got to check that link out ? it is a massive 50 dishes all together!

So we were excited ? waiting for the announcement of this years winner.

I don?t know how to say this better ? when I saw the list, I was taken aback by all the changes and I felt that it was a bit of a step backwards.

CRA 2010
CRA 2011


50 dishes awarded:

- 25 Gold award

- 25 Silver award
25 dishes awarded:

- 9 Gold with Distinction award

- 16 Gold award


8 restaurants with 2 awards
2 restaurants with 3 awards

5 restaurants with 2 awards


Separate award for Cantonese Noodles and Northern Noodles
Single category for Noodles


Hot Pot category
Eliminated: Hot Pot


Vegetable category
Renamed: Vegetarian


Clams, Oyster and Scallop category
Renamed: Scallop



New category: Rice



New category: Lobster

In 2010 there were 50 dishes awarded gold or silver in a 25 categories. For this year, there were only 25 awards given ? the number of dishes were halved. I was really looking forward to an equally long list of 50 dishes last year so that I have more to try. LOL!

I somewhat understand too that it is no joke identifying 50 dishes year in, year out. I can imagine the number of dishes that had to be tasted just to get down to the final 25 dishes.

I still wish that there are 50 dishes! What I find hard to understand is that new award called the ?Gold with Distinction? award. These are awards given for the dishes that won the same award last year. Does it send a message that the Chinese restaurants had not progressed the past year by not being able introduce new signature dishes in these nine categories? So in effect, we do not really have 25 new dishes, we only have 16 new ones. Sigh ? from 50 new signature dishes to 16 new signature dishes this year.

For the first time, two restaurants swept three awards. Both of these restaurants, Landmark and Sea Harbour also … More after the jump. Click to read the rest of Chinese Restaurant Awards 2011 – Critics Choice Winners Announced (766 words)

© ben for Chow Times, 2011. |
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