Steven Che Throws the Plates for His Own Tasting Menu

Steven Che cooks at Haisan, a thirty-seat restaurant that opened in October 2026 at 2892 Commercial Drive in Vancouver. He calls the food Chinese Pacific Northwest: the Chinese cooking he grew up with, made with British Columbia seafood and produce. Dinner runs about sixteen courses over three hours. The plates under those courses are his too. Che spent years throwing ceramics for the room, and every guest eats off something he shaped.

He was born in Macau and moved to Vancouver at six with his mother and two older sisters. Scout Magazine puts the family near Victoria Drive and 50th Avenue. His mother later opened a juice shop in Richmond, which she still runs, so Che spent a lot of time on his own. He watched Food Network. He cooked at home. By thirteen he was already working in hospitality. After a short stretch at UBC he left for the University of Florida to study dietetics, the nearest degree he could find to food. Nutrition classes did not hold him. Cooking did. He started a culinary arts student union, took summer kitchen jobs, and in the summer of 2013 enrolled at Northwest Culinary Academy on Main Street while he was home in Vancouver.

After Florida he emailed restaurants he admired. One reply came from Maaemo in Oslo, then a three-Michelin-star kitchen. Che offered a six-month stage. Scout Magazine says they hired him after three months. He landed in pastry with almost no pastry training, struggled, then had a service where everything landed on time. The head chef told him it was good. Over roughly eleven months he moved through stations and learned how a big tasting-menu kitchen keeps its pace. From Norway he went to Orana in Adelaide, a three-hatted restaurant that ran a long menu with only four or five cooks. Same ambition. A much smaller crew. That difference stayed with him.

He came home in early 2020, wanting to learn Vancouver’s supply chain from the inside, and took a job at Scratch Kitchen in North Vancouver as the pandemic shut dining rooms. Pizza was the craft that made sense there: familiar food, tight fermentation, a business that could survive a quiet city. In April 2022 he opened Wild Flour Pizza Co. in Burnaby. In August 2024 he and co-founder Jan Natividad opened Just Pizza at 1629 Kingsway, back in East Vancouver, with a sourdough crust and toppings that run from margherita to Filipino breakfast. Alongside the shop he kept running fine-dining pop-ups he had started in friends’ homes in December 2021. The Chinese Restaurant Awards named him Rising Star Chef of the Year in November 2024. In March 2026 he took first place in the Garland Canada Culinary Competition at the Restaurants Canada Show in Mississauga.

Haisan is those pop-ups with a front door. The name joins the Cantonese words for ocean and mountain, 海 and 山. Che told Daily Hive the cooking sits between the Chinese restaurants, Hong Kong–style cafés, and dim sum halls of his childhood and the White Spot and Tim Hortons side of the same city. The restaurant’s own site says it more plainly: Cantonese families here have long lived with both dim sum and Nanaimo bars. Scott & Scott Architects designed the thirty-seat room. Jessica Ye, from the wine group SuperNouveau, looks after the floor and the drinks. Adam Christie is chef-partner. The tasting menu is $180, with wine and tea pairings beside it.

In a 2023 South China Morning Post interview, while the dinners were still pop-ups, Che said each dish was rooted in memory and in something he loves. That still fits the Commercial Drive night. He hosts service with his team. He still makes the ceramics. Come for sixteen courses of Chinese Pacific Northwest cooking, and leave having eaten off plates he threw himself.