54th Ave Cafe Restaurant

The service is slow, slow, slow if you dine in. If you order takeout, double the amount of time they say it’ll take for your food to be ready, because otherwise you’ll find yourself waiting around for a good 30 minutes or so. Despite the annoyances with the quality of service, the staff are always friendly.
We find ourselves here fairly often whenever in Vancouver due to the restaurant’s proximity to family. The ma po tofu, lettuce wraps, and BBQ pork fried rice are staples of any order, and are definitely some of the restaurant’s best offerings.

This place really isn’t too good. Their Chinese BBQ selection is below average and their western baked meals are worse than most Hong Kong cafes. The only dish I enjoy here is the ma po tofu on rice — it’s actually very good! The price is good here though if you just don’t care at all about taste that day :/

The family and I finally tried this place due to time shortage and location convenience.
I was surprised that at prime dinner time. the place was empty … I should have taken that fact as an omen …
The food was literally flavourless. We ordered 3 bowls of soup with three distinctly different soup bases and a seafood fried noodle dish.
The soup bases we ordered were Coconut. Century egg. Fish with Tomatoe … I’m so sure it was ALL THE SAME soup base the gave us!!! It was like drinking hot water. No flavour.
The seafood fried noodles had pea-​sized scallops … for $ 14??? And they are cash only
Sorry but never again.

Not the best food, ingredients arent the best as well. I find problems with HK restaurants are their excess use of sauce which i find disgusting. Serive could use more improvement as well.

This place is probably one of the worst restaurants you can find in Vancouver. Their service and food are both horrible and I think it’s a miracle they’re still in business!
Do not go there even if you’re starving, because you’ll probably starve to death even before they will come and serve you with the horrible «food» they offer.

My husband and I were unsure of this place because of the mixed reviews, but we decided to try it anyway.
We really liked the food! The service was great– friendly & accommodating. I asked for a baked vegetable spaghetti in cream sauce and they did an awesome job. There aren’t very many veggie options on the menu, but they seemed happy to make this for me and it turned out very good (uploaded a photo too).
Only complain is the spring rolls were a bit greasy, but other than that everything was good. We’ll be back some time to try out the hk style breakfast. Yumm!

As I keep reviewing places in Vancouver, I notice a certain trend in my lunch habits. Being a CBC, I find myself awfully attracted to HK style cafes or cha chan tengs. As I keep going to these café’s I find myself ordering roughly the same things each time and I’ve done it enough to consider myself quite an expert of several dishes and drinks. These include buttered pineapple buns, mix grilled steaks of (beef, chicken, pork, and occasionally fish cutlet), Singapore fried noodles, hk mixed coffee/​tea, and Iced lemon tea.
It’s been a while since I’ve been a while since I’ve been here, but after I sat down I noticed the prices on the menu seemed to have increased a bit. That did not come as a surprise, but around this area, paying over $ 10 for common dishes felt expensive. The service that day consisted of two waitresses. One of them was happy to serve us and would come immediately once we waved at her, the other however, kept ignoring us. Even as she walked right passed our table, I asked for the menu again, she refused to acknowledge my request immediately and didn’t return until a couple minutes later. This happened two more times when I asked for a pair of chop sticks and lastly the bill. That definitely put a damper to their service.
I ordered a mix grill of steaks with onion sauce. The food there was decent and the portions were pretty good. There wasn’t a choice of soup like most other places when ordering combo lunches like this, but it’s not too big of a complaint. The lemon ice tea I ordered could have been sweeter, and the hk coffee milk tea I ordered to go was too sweet.
Although there aren’t many hk style cafes around South Burnaby, I don’t think I’ll miss this place too much. It’s going to be a while till I come back to this café again.

I love 54^th because of its convenience and reliability. I don’t know what a «hong kong style café» is, but it is practically a Chinese diner restaurant.
The staff is always friendly. Having been there a few times, the food is consistently good.

Good food, good value reasonable service. Honest business. I wish they put more money into the business to make it nicer. Needs renovation.

I waited to be seated for 20 minutes, completely ignored. The place smelt really really bad and I tried to ignore it, however, after a while I just had to leave ’cause I was getting a headache from the smell of what seemed like a dead animal. It was a blessing in disguise ’cause I noticed that they were a cash only establishment and I wouldn’t have been able to pay for my meal only to do dishes in what seemed like the worst kitchen in Vancouver. They treated me like my pressence was annoying to them instead of a customer who just wanted a meal. I get a better meal and service at the fast food place inside the mall.

A nice neighbourhood Hong Kong style café restaurant, the kind you take your family to for dinner on a weekday. The place is clean, inviting, and comfortable. The staff are nice and welcoming. The food is good, and sometimes surprisingly great. The prices are reasonable. Don’t expect a culinary tour de force, but do expect to have a good meal in a nice environment.

I would give this place zero stars if I could. Tried this place for the first time because of convenience. I just happened to pass through the neighborhood. Waited 30+ minutes for my braised beef tendon yee mein. No apologies from the staff of course, being a Chinese place and all. The wait was not worth it. The noodles were fine, but some tendons were tough and some were soft. And hard or soft, they had a strange soapy taste to it. The HK style tea I ordered with the meal was tasted weak. Not the best cup of nai-​cha I’ve ever had.
Horrible experience all around. Definitely won’t be going back. There are way better HK style cafes.

If it wasn’t for the location, it’s just average – being nice. Great to have a HK style café without driving to Rmd or Chinatown or Burnaby.
Always like to compare the baked pork chop over rice, and it’s so-​so, still prefer Goldstone better. It’s good enough if one’s in the mood.
Plenty of booth seating, and natural light, and enough parking in this mini-​plaza.

* Average level HK style café *
There are a lot of HK style café options in the Vancouver area. But there is always room to try a new one.
I took my standard test dish of baked seafood rice to see what they were made of. It came on a lunch special which included soup and a choice of coffee or tea drinks.
The vegetable cabbage soup had nice chunks of freshly cut veggies and a surprising twist of lemon peel (like the kind you get in lemon tea) to add acidity. It oddly worked well. Photo:
The seafood baked rice was a decent sized portion and had a good amount of fresh seafood in it. There were scallops, shrimp, fish, mussels, and squid. All of the seafood was very fresh tasting. The rice underneath was a slightly fried rice, but it unfortunately did not have good wok hei. It was a bit soggier than usual, and I missed that added flavour of good wok hei. The sauce was also a bit blander than I normally prefer. Overall the seafood was good in this dish, but the rest was below par. Here are some photos of it: Whole dish (
), closeup of a shrimp (
), closeup of a mussel (
).
The cold HK style milk tea came in a very large glass, but was a bit watered down because they put way too much ice and let it melt too much. I prefer my milk tea to have a stronger tea flavour and a bit more condensed milk flavour too. Photo:
Long and short of it? I still prefer BT Café for this style of food:

Not the best Hong Kong Café I’ve been to.
Me and a friend came here with her kid way back when and we both ordered this chicken thing with spaghetti noodles. It was gross to say the least. The chicken was fried to the point of putrefaction and it was detestably greasy. The spaghetti was bland and over cooked and all the grease from the chicken coated the noodles bleh! That was the last time I went there!
St3Fin

Quite possibly one of the worst Hk style cafes around.
They seriously need to hire new cooks as either they really can’t cook or they lack taste buds or something.

This place is much like Honolulu. The workers here are not friendly, but they’re pretty efficient. I’ve come here quite a few times in the past couple of years, not for the food but because it’s convenient and filling.
The prices are decent for the portion size they give you. it’s usually no more than 13 dollars, usually below 10. The lunch combos are pretty good cause they include a drink as well. They have only about a handful of vegetarian dishes but it’s not too bad. The vegetables with creamy sauce on rice is delicious. But some of their other items are just downright oily.
I recall this one time they were gonna kick out a friend of ours eating with us cause we brought outside food. We were quite upset since everyone else was ordering from the restaurant (we had about 10 people). But it’s understandable so I won’t hold that grudge against them.
Other than convenience, there’s not much else going on for this place.

Standard HK café with food that leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve been here a few times strictly out of convenience (I am in the area and couldn’t be bothered to drive out any further).
While good value like most other HK cafes — the food here has always been bland. Unlike the reviewer below, I was not impressed with their baked pork chop on rice (perhaps a different chef?). Also had their deep fried silverfish and I couldn’t taste anything other than what appears to be really dirty frying oil.
The interior is well-​lit with all the windows and it is spacious. But the stay away from the parkade (take street parking if you can find it) as parking is cramped and full of bad drivers.
Doubtful I will return soon but probably the best value in this area of town.

I still think this place had changed their chef. Going from a quiet dead restaurant to a super busy restaurant really says something about this place. Usually I will be ordering the tasty baked pork chop rice or baked seafood rice, but this time Ive decided to switch it up by ordering curry beef brisket. The dish came up perfect with a generous portion of tender beef and potatoes topped with their curry sauce and a side plate of rice. All three of these dishes satisfied my hunger. Who knows what other dishes of theirs are just as good so I will be returning back to this HK café.

My first time at the 54^th and this is another one of those good cheap Hong Kong style café, last Sunday me and boys went for lunch and the place was full. We had to wait for around 10 minutes for a table. I ordered the classic bake pork chop on rice, it took a little longer but it was worth it. The rice dish topped with a generous portion of pork chop and tomatoes and onion, blended with a kind of tomato sauce and cheese. The whole thing was bake and the cheese just melted on top of everything. Of course the dish came with a drink of your choice just like a good old Hong Kong style café, all around for $ 9. I even had left over for next day, wow!