When most college students think about going to Canada for spring break or a weekend trip, their thoughts tend to gravitate toward taking advantage of the lower drinking age, snowboarding in Whistler, or both. Although it is a different country, Canada doesn’t differ much culturally from the United States — unless you know where to look.

Just south of Vancouver is Richmond, B.C., which has a population that is more than 50 percent Asian. This large Asian community, the majority of which is Chinese, makes Richmond home to some of the best Chinese food available outside China.

Although Richmond doesn’t have a Chinatown neighborhood like Vancouver (Asian businesses and restaurants are spread throughout the city), most of its Asian restaurants, stores and shopping malls are in the Golden Village neighborhood, bordered by No. 3 Road, Sea Island Way, Garden City Road and Alderbridge Way.

“Because of the enormous influx of Hong Kong immigrants to Richmond/Vancouver in the early ‘90s, the predominant Chinese cuisine [in Richmond] is Cantonese-style,” said Richmond native Lorna Yee, food writer for Seattle Magazine and cook at Caché, a private dinner club in Seattle. “Chinese food in Richmond is light years away from what they serve here in Seattle.”

One of the specialties of Cantonese cuisine is dim sum, which could best be described as Chinese-style brunch. It consists mainly of steamed and fried dumplings, but also includes small plates of other food. The food is usually traipsed on carts or steamer baskets, from which customers then select individual plates.

At Sun Sui Wah, dim sum is a much more formal affair than what you would find in Seattle. Instead of carts being frantically pushed around and waiters shouting their contents, diners select their choice of dim sum on a note card, which is then whisked off to the kitchen by a tuxedoed waiter.

“If [Hong Kong dim sum restaurant] Victoria City is rated a ‘10’ on a scale (based on skill, variety and taste), I would say the better restaurants in Richmond would rate a solid eight, and a ‘better’ dim sum restaurant like Jade Garden in Seattle would rate a two,” Yee said.

Indeed, the items at Sun Sui Wah are much better than anything at even the best Seattle dim sum restaurants, such as melt-in-your-mouth steamed eel with black bean sauce, or a more subtly flavored dish of steamed chicken with shiitake mushrooms and bamboo shoots.

Another of Golden Village’s culinary attractions is inside its malls, which don’t look very different from normal suburban malls on the outside, but are a completely different world on the inside.

When you enter Parker Place, you can find the latest in Hong Kong fashion alongside stores offering freshly killed turtles and barbecued ducks. In addition to its several produce, meat and seafood stores, Parker Place has a food court that rivals any restaurant in Seattle’s Chinatown. The offerings are mostly Chinese and range from steamed or fried dumplings and smoothies to noodle soup, with a choice of a variety of meats, including internal organs and blood.

Also worth visiting are Yaohan Centre, which is home to Osaka, one of Richmond’s largest Asian grocery stores, and Aberdeen Centre, which is the oldest and largest of Richmond’s Asian malls.

However, not all of the area’s good Asian food is outside the city. Vancouver itself is home to a large number of Asian restaurants, and while Richmond holds the title of best Chinese restaurants, Vancouver is home to the area’s best Japanese and Korean food.

Korean restaurants, which are seldom seen or are hidden under the guise of Seattle teriyaki joints, are abundant in Vancouver, and offer food that’s hard to find in Seattle. At Shabusen, diners can choose from an all-you-can-eat menu mainly comprised of mediocre sushi and tempura, but the real draw comes from the Korean-style barbecue, in which diners cook on a gas grill that is built into their tables.

Vancouver’s West End neighborhood, specifically the blocks surrounding the intersection of Denman and Robson, is to Vancouver’s Japanese restaurant scene as the Golden Village is to Chinese food in Richmond.

Zakkushi serves yakitori, literally “grilled birds,” or Japanese style barbecued meat served on skewers. All the skewers are grilled over binchotan charcoal, a type of charcoal valued for the high temperatures it can reach and the flavor it imparts in food. Most skewers cost $1 to $2, and range from more traditional things like livers dipped in a sweet-salty, soy-based sauce and chicken thighs and leeks, to mochi wrapped with pork and topped with a slice of cheese.

Guu with Garlic serves izakaya-style food, which could be described as a Japanese version of Spanish tapas, with small plates of food eaten along with sake or sho-chu, both Japanese alcoholic beverages akin to vodka. This style of food, combined with a young staff who shout to each other from across the small dining room to the open kitchen make it one of Vancouver’s best izakaya restaurants.

“We opened seven years ago and business was bad. We were the only izakaya restaurant on Robson. Now there are five in the West End,” said Atsu Hayashi, manager of Guu with Garlic. Although there are a few restaurants that call themselves izakaya in Seattle, Hayashi said none of them were as good as the places in Vancouver.

In fact, the food at Guu with Garlic might not look familiar to someone accustomed to Japanese restaurants in Seattle. The grilled salted pork cheek with orange ponzu is a cut of pork unfamiliar to the Western table, but which rivals the belly (which most of us recognize in its most common form as bacon) in terms of fatty juiciness. Equally juicy and tender is the grilled beef tongue with garlic chips. Among Guu with Garlic’s more original items is the kabocha korokke, a deep-fried pumpkin croquette with a hard-boiled egg in the middle.

“Seattle has some pretty good Asian food, but Vancouver’s is so much better,” said senior Anderson Arifin, who ate at Guu with Garlic over spring break with a group of friends. “Really, the only reason we go to Vancouver is to eat all these foods that Seattle doesn’t have.”

[Reach reporter Jeremy Konick at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]