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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 t

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