Restaurant Awards 2026: Restaurant of the Year, Dynasty

The 2026 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant of the Year is… Dynasty Seafood Restaurant.

The lobby of the West Broadway office building that houses Dynasty Seafood Restaurant is a time warp into prime ’80s architecture, with faux marble so vividly green you’ll think you’ve landed onto a local production of Wicked.

Step into the restaurant and you are greeted by a tastefully appointed (though brightly lit) space, buzzing with diners and featuring a glorious view of downtown Vancouver set against the North Shore mountains.

The room dates to 1992, when the vaunted Hong Kong East Ocean Group opened two locations in Vancouver (the other being the recently shuttered Victoria Restaurant). When East Ocean ownership returned to Hong Kong, local management took over and, after some fits and starts, Alfred Yeung bought the business in 2009 with a focus on maintaining the highest standards of Hong Kong Cantonese style cuisine and service.

Dynasty Seafood specializes in banquet-style dishes, and there is always an air of celebration in the room. The flavours and presentation are amped up just so, while adhering to the strict Cantonese ideals of freshness, restraint and refinement. Chef Cao Can Hui is the rare Vancouver chef who trained in-house with the original chef, Sam Leung, under a gruelling mentorship process that is on the wane in most classic kitchens (including traditional formal French and Italian restaurants).

Cao’s dishes have a sense of a joyful exuberance, backed with superlative “wok hei,” that elusive aliveness that only comes from vigorous cooking over powerful gas burners. The most photo-friendly dish, Typhoon Shelter Dungeness crab with a jaw-dropping tower of spicy sticky rice, has gone viral on Instagram. Equal care and craftsmanship are given to vegetarian dishes, with a bowling ball-sized stuffed Napa cabbage, filled with Buddha Feast (mushrooms and black moss) and ceremoniously served tableside like an auspicious present. In response to modern tastes, food allergies and preferences are also taken seriously. With enough advance notice, they will even remove soy sauce for a truly gluten-free meal.

Dim sum chef Garley Leung handcrafts his dishes every day. Classic Cantonese techniques are married with lively flourishes, flaky BBQ pork pastries arrive scented with lemon, steamed black mushroom dumplings are given a back note of truffle and black pepper pork pastries are redolent with floral heat. 

Dynasty Seafood draws a direct line back to the powerhouse 1990s Hong Kong restaurants that brought confidence and intensity to Vancouver Chinese restaurants, qualities that still drive excellence today. Hong Kong-trained management teams and chefs made Vancouver home, setting the scene for restaurants like Dynasty to be born. Along the way, the Cantonese penchant for fresh live seafood and seasonal ingredients created a uniquely local style of Chinese cuisine.

The superb cooking and service standards at Dynasty Seafood have not gone unnoticed, with Michelin recommendations three years running, multiple awards from—ahem—Vancouver magazine and the 2025 award for Best Chinese Restaurant in Canada by the Chinese Restaurant Awards. 

And now it has won our 2026 Restaurant of the Year title. So, why now?

Perhaps no other city in the world welcomes and respects various food traditions like Vancouver does, weaving top-notch restaurants into our local dining culture. Dynasty Seafood has become a true reflection of that. Look around the dining room on any given evening and you’ll see a multi-generational Chinese family celebrating a birthday, a table of golfing buddies enjoying their annual king crab blow-out or a group of serious oenophiles who have brought their own stemware and vintages, knowing the staff will provide the right mix of formality and ease to the meal.

And that beautiful dining room view? Well, it’s under the constant threat of being lost to property redevelopment. You can’t get much more Vancouver than that.

Dynasty
108–777 W Broadway
dynasty-restaurant.ca

Find more of the best Vancouver restaurants on our list of 2026 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Award winners.