Dan dan noodles and braised eggplant claypot are probably not what you would expect to order at the hospital. But that is exactly what patients at Richmond Hospital can now expect, as part of a new culturally inclusive menu that has been revamped by local chefs. The new recipes have been designed to be more familiar to Richmond’s large Chinese community, offering the comforts of home during challenging times. “People want to see food that they recognize,” chef William Lew, who designed the new menu with chef Sharon Chan, told CTV News. “If you ever go to the hospital, you always can see people bringing in food for their families, friends, loved ones. And it’s not a knock to the hospital food itself, but it’s just cultural.” For Liena Pow, who runs the program as Vancouver Coastal Health’s regional manager of strategic projects for food services, food is fundamental to the healing process. “We say food is medicine,” Pow told CTV News. “It is one of the ways we provide care, and so when a patient is in the hospital, food is very often one of the few moments of the day that is comforting or just even feels normal.” The menu was first evaluated by patient partners as well as clinical dieticians, to make sure the food not only tasted good, but also met nutritional standards. But Lew believes that some of the dishes they designed for the menu may not be an obvious choice for people from different backgrounds. “If it’s congee or like something as simple as like a ginger-based thing, it might not be naturally apparent to maybe other cultures,” he said. “But for you know for a Chinese culture, you’re like, oh, that’s healing immediately.” Another goal of the new menu is to help lower the hospital’s carbon footprint. A number of dishes are plant-based, and Pow says locally sourced ingredients were used as much as possible. “We’re also using lower emissions proteins like chicken and like fish,” Pow said. Many traditional dishes have also been revamped to try and lessen their impact on the environment, by replacing pork or beef. Lew says one of their popular menu items is mapo tofu, a classic Chinese dish that he says typically includes pork. “We’ve done this with like a tofu crumble,” he said. “We crumble and make it into something that feels like pork. So it’s really interesting that no one even recognizes that it’s not.” Lew hopes that a menu that is more appetizing to patients will also result in less food waste. The project builds on the ‘planetary health menu’ that was implemented at Vancouver General Hospital in 2024, followed by Lions Gate Hospital the next year. Richmond Hospital started offering some of the new dishes in February, and the new menu became fully integrated in July. Pow hopes they will be able to scale up the project, once they get more feedback from patients. “We look at which ones are the favourites, which ones are the best, and then we would like to, in the future, expand them out to all of our sites,” she said. So far the team says the feedback has been very positive, with Lew calling it “really powerful and emotional.” He describes patients asking for more congee or noodles, dishes their families used to have to source themselves. “They would have to go somewhere and find it in Richmond, or drive somewhere really far, and just to bring them something that they’re familiar with.” Chef Lew says he has been cooking for two and a half decades, and never thought he would end up making hospital food. “We love it. We’re passionate to help people heal through food, and we are passionate to share our culture through that lens,” he said about himself and collaborator Sharon Chan. Lew told CTV News he’s Chinese-Canadian while Chan is from Hong Kong—and that while they both run lots of other restaurants, this project brings them back to their roots. “Both our grandparents were chefs in our respective countries, and we’re able to bring that full circle to the hospital.” Playing an important role in a patient’s healing journey is not lost on them. “The priority and the importance of what we love to do is to help others,” Lew said. “And this is one of the best ways we can do it.”
