With only 94 hours in a city we’d never visited together, our 45-minute wait for a dumplings order could have been a poor investment of precious time.

But we requested the off-menu No. 7 at Blnd Tger in Vancouver’s Chinatown and crossed the street to an Irish pub that was so used to such visitors that it featured a cocktail called “Waiting For #7.” Early into a second drink, our notification arrived via text: “Your dumplings are ready!!!”

Our order granted us passage through Blnd Tger’s innocuous walk-in fridge door into the appropriately cool world of Laowai, a speakeasy with expertly crafted, creatively presented concoctions and, yes, dumplings that more than justified the enthusiastic punctuation in the text.

The revelations behind that door were among the several we packed into a lo

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