Marcus Chen

Marcus Chen has spent fifteen years eating through East and Southeast Asia before settling in Vancouver, where he has covered the city's restaurant scene — and Toronto's — for the better part of a decade. He is one of the few North American critics who trained in professional kitchens before moving to criticism, spending two years in a Tokyo ramen shop and another year in a Hong Kong dim sum house. That experience shapes how he evaluates a kitchen: he is less interested in concept than in execution, less impressed by ambition than by the discipline that turns ambition into something you'd order again. He covers contemporary Canadian cuisine, Japanese and Chinese cooking in all their regional forms, omakase counters, and the neighborhood spots that define a city's actual eating culture rather than its press releases. His guides to ramen in Vancouver and Toronto are considered benchmarks in the category. Before joining TastyPals, he contributed restaurant criticism to print and digital publications in Vancouver and was a founding editor of a regional food publication that covered the Pacific Northwest.

Areas of expertise

Cities covered