I Cafe

I have not been there more than 3 month. I went there for dinner yesterday! Service was good.
But i ate Baked Portugal Chicken Pasta. Was worse. Paste looked oily (they put on the side). The sauce. Iike glue… The taste not that good! Anyway I won’t go there anymore.

Food is great and a lot of choice. Hong Kong style is a plus. Worth to try out and you will not be disappointed.

Glouchester and icafe is probably my two go to hong kong café places. Sometimes u just wanna eat curry beef brisket on rice and pork chop rice. Hk style french toast and drink some lemon ice tea. The chicken steaks are pretty good too. I like icafe more because i feel its bigger and less crowded. Easier to find parking. Service is a tad better than glouchester. Its good solid fast asian food.

Very good seafood fried rice, the cuttlefish scallop, prawn n crab meat were all so fresh and good
And not greasy

if you are having those Hong Kong style café craving, you can’t go wrong with I café. The food and milk tea are not bad, but it is more towards the pricey side compared to others. I go for their rice omelet with beef sauce and their cold milk tea/​coffee drink. There’s 10 parking stalls reserved for I café at the hoilday inn across the street. The cusomer service is good as it can get more those kind of restaurant, therefore it exceeded my expectation.

We came for dinner on a Friday night around 6. We got there just in time as it filled up quickly after we were seated. We ordered the following:
1) Dinner special — beef with black beans sauce over fried rice. It came with a choice of cream (of turkey?) soup or borscht. — It’s funny that we couldn’t understand the waitress when she asked us if we wanted cream or borscht soup. She didn’t explain what the cream soup was, but we think it’s turkey. The soup was surprisingly good. The main dish was also very tasty. Just the right amount of sauce. Fried rice wasn’t too greasy.
2) Fried pork chop with spaghetti, came with steamed carrots and zucchini. — This came with 2 large pieces of breaded pork chops (but with bone in) with a bit of mustard sauce on the side. Spaghetti was a bit tasteless. Veggies were a bit plain. My son enjoyed this.
3) Seafood fettuccini. This was the most expensive dish at $ 15, but the noodles were slightly mushy wide rice noodles, not the fettuccini we expected. The sauce was a weird congealed texture. The taste was good and it was a huge portion. We won’t order this next time.
4) Singapore fried vermicelli — This was perfectly made with fresh ingredients. Not too greasy, and a decent portion.
5) Lemon ice tea — sweetened and very good.
Overall, we found the food to be good quality, large portioned and reasonably priced. Although some menu items are a bit strange if you’re not used to the HK Café style, you can still find some main stream Cantonese food here. I have heard that ramen and other soup noodles are good here as well, so maybe we will try that next time when it’s not so hot.

Not even worth trying. I understand not to expect too much good service from chinese restaurant, but this is the experience ever! The waiter werent attentive at all, we have to get up to flagged the waiter over to take our order. If service sucks but food is good then i wouldnt give this place a 1 star, but unfortunately i wansnt lucky. For a place claiming themselves having good steak and primb ribs, both we order came out overcooked! Not only they wasted a good piece of meat (not cheap at all $ 25+), they dont know how to cook it. We order a piece of prime rib and ask for medium, it came out medium well, almost well done, but they still argued its medium. In addition, who serves a piece of steak on a sizzling plate and ask how the customer want it cook, it will ALL turn out well done anyway!

What a disappointment. The wifi password of this café was «best café,» but the restaurant that neglects customer needs shouldn’t self-​claim as being the «best.»
My aunt ordered the prawn and scallop fettuccine alfredo and it was way under-​seasoned and nearly inedible. The thick, clay-​like sauce that coated every strand of gummy fettuccine was stuck to the dish after two minutes! Not only did that look extremely unappetizing, consuming that blob of sticky pasta will surely give majority of people indigestion.
Additionally, my sister ordered the charbroiled rib eye steak, cooked to a medium level of doneness, but it turned out tough, dry, and overcooked to nearly well done! We explained to the waiter that we asked the rib eye to be cooked to medium and showed them that the steak was seared on the outside, but not even pink on the inside. The waiter understood our concern, promised to remake our order, and took the plate back to the kitchen.
However, another waiter returned the same plate of steak with a new slit through the center and confronted us that the rib eye was indeed medium. The steak was clearly overcooked, but the apathetic waiter was unwilling to listen and did not propose any solutions to satisfy our needs nor to atone for the trouble that they had caused. Since my family did not want to spend anymore time with the unaccommodating waiter, we just asked him to give us the check and he merely left the plate of cold steak in front of us (assuming he was expecting us to finish the rib eye after he brought it back to the kitchen and sliced through it! YUCK! Who knows what else he did with the steak?!)
A restaurant that is unwilling to listen to its customers will never excel to serve good food nor to provide great service. The overpriced menu items, waiters who treat customers poorly, and the unsatisfactory food execution of this restaurant will highly unlikely bring success to its future businesses.

Absolutely terrible! Ridiculously overpriced for mediocre pretentious western food. Do yourself a favor and go somewhere further south in the Richmond for way better food.
First of all, we were a family of 6 and they quickly sat us at the furthest table of the diner room where there were still panko crust all over the booth-​gross! At that point we were just happy that we got wifi and so hungry that we just want to eat.
Fast forward to the food. I specifically ordered the $ 21 medium rib eye and not the $ 12combo steak (pork chop and steak) because of its highly marbled juiciness. Instead, all I got was an over cooked, dried, stiff, thin and flank-​like steak. It seems as though the restaurant ordered the cheapest and lowest grade of steak and call it «charbroiled ribeye steak” — what a disgrace! To mask that sorry piece meat they call ribeye steak, the chef pours this lumpy brownish orange sauce all over the steak incase any one realize its low quality.
We address the issues to the waiter and he promise to replace my order with filet mignon that way better, tender and promising.
5 minutes later, an older waiter came out justifying that the steak was indeed medium. He even proved it by saying that he sliced the steak in half and it was still pink. Without finishing his sentence, he marched back into the kitchen to bring back the plate of food with a big cut in the middle of my steak and expect me to finish it. Are you kidding me? How is this sanitary? I was so grossed out that I didn’t eat anything for the rest of the night.
If they can do that in front of customers, just think about what they do in the kitchen when no one is looking.

This is a typical Hong Kong Style café. Don’t expect expensive restaurant style good. We had the beef and tendon curry with rice. Very reminiscent of my early days in Hong Kong 20 – 30 years ago. The rice noodle soup with shredded pork and preserved vegetables was also pretty authentic. Not much has changed since I was last here in 2011.

Located on the second floor, the décor was pretty clean from the looks of it. I would say it’s one of the few cafes now a days that I feels like a HK café… I can be totally wrong.
I ordered the black bean noodles with beef ~ Crispy noodles style… and I devoured as much of it as I could. It was really tasty, but not the best I’ve had.
Least to say that I left full and satisfied.
However… the staff didn’t really check up on us and wondered if everything was going well. I don’t recall the waitress /​waiter refilling our cups of water until we were leaving (which never makes sense to me when they do that.)
Not a bad place to catch a bite to eat. I went here around 1−2pm for lunch and it wasn’t packed at all. I don’t know how it’s like around noon, but … perhaps think about pushing your lunch an hour back if you want a quiet meal here.

Typical HK Style café near VGH and Broadway corridor.
Lunch specials have 2 different menus.
One comes with meal, hot drink and Soup for $ 11.50
Other just meal and hot drink for $ 9.75
Ordered the basic, Chinese styled Minced Beef over rice with Fried Egg $ 9.75 special. At the $ 11.50 menu, I think the minced beef on rice is the Western kind.
I think the difference between the Chinese style and Western Minced Beef is that the Western Minced Beef is basically bolognese with a sweet tomato base and the Chinese style is more salty brown sauce with peas.
Fast quick service, table turn over fast at lunch time.
You can park across the street at the casino but you have to call them at the gate to have them let you in. Park and walk across the street.

Indeed 3 stars is all I can give to this average food, average service, average everything restaurant that is a slight step above fast food chains.
I went in there for a quick lunch with my parents as we stroll along Broadway. And their lunch special is actually quite pricey at $ 9.45 and $ 11.50, though it does include a cheap coffee/​milk drink and a bowl of soup. To balance the higher than usual «lunch special» prices, they do offer a HUGE quantity in return, the food plate is enough for two.
Fairly clean for a Chinese restaurant, booth seating available, and the second floor seating on the Broadway facing side is quite bright and pretty good people watching view.

This is a HK style café. The food was decent. We ordered off the lunch menus. My spaghetti dish was good with the soft over easy fried egg. Good amount of minced meat in the sauce. Also, it came with a choice of drink. My friend had the lunch special combo and he stated it was good as well. Combo included a drink, soup and bun. Only issue was that after we were done eating, we spent the rest of the day and the next day more gassy and bloated than usual… seems to be something in the food…
Service was on the slow side. The server took orders off a table of people who showed up after us and we had to flag him to get him to take our order. It took awhile for the food to arrive as well. We also get to pack our own food home when we had leftovers.

Day after day
Hong Kong style café food is its own cuisine — at least in my books — and my favourite meal is Portuguese baked curry and a dong-​lai-​cha. I’m pretty sure I butchered the latter but I say it with love. It’s just milk tea and it’s sooooo good. The curry is a creamy yellow chicken curry and if I’m right (which I like to think I am) the dish originated in Macau. It’s an organic fusion dish — organic in that it’s a natural cross-​over of cultures and flavours. This is the fusion food I live for. Forced fusion on the other hand? Recall my thoughts on Pidgin.
We shared the spaghetti. It comes with a fried egg. And it works — makes the sauce carbonera-​creamy.
The curry was not what I expected. The consistency was thinner and there was no gratin top that you get from a baked dish, but the flavours were there.
With it’s extensive menu, I Café is the perfect place for a big bite: the portions are large, the prices are good and the food is delicious. Winner winner Chinese chicken dinner. Am I able to say that? Did anyone trademark that? In this day and age… you never know.

I haven’t return to I Café over 3 years! Time to give them another update review.
We went there for late lunch, it almost 2ish and only 1 table customer there.
We ordered lunch special again! The portion was more than adequate and the price as affordable. The quality and taste is fair. However, we had to waive the server even got up to look for them.
For lunch special, the soup and drink come together. My hubby ordered short rib with black bean sauce on rice — We couldn’t find short rib on the plate, it served with chopped pork chop with black bean sauce! We didn’t bother return it coz no waiter on the floor.
I had pan fried chicken n fish fillet with spaghetti — it was ok.
I’m not sure because we came here for late lunch, therefore, we didn’t get the service or they really doing downwards now.
May be I come back 3 years after then give them another review.

I used to come to icafe quite a bit, but I hadn’t been here for quite a while. First off parking sucks! As far as I can tell there’s no free parking around. I ended up paying $ 3 to park and eat. That’s $ 3 added to my meal! I’m not normally a cheap ass but I don’t like going to restaurants where I have to pay for parking! Like damn it we pay taxes, parking should be public domain!
Ok enough of my ranting! I like icafe! To me the food is pretty good at a reasonable price. I had the spaghetti with minced beef and a fried egg. I went to icafe with a friend and he had the steak and fish plate… We had 2 bowls of Russian Borscht, a dinner roll with butter, and 2 drinks for $ 25. Pretty cheap! If my friend had a high voice and breasts I would have called it a cheap date! Haha
Anyways… Even though I have to pay for parking, I would come back to icafe!

To have a HK style café, not too shabby.
Top floor, w/​a view.
Good selection of $ 9.45 lunch specials, went w/​the safe ol’ spaghetti w/​some tomato cream sauce & sunny side up egg. Included a drink too, nice bonus, try getting this in DT. Hit the right spot, but nothing to knock your socks off.
Some booth seating on the right side.
Above average décor, clean washrooms.
Nothing too exciting.

I must have walked by this place dozens of times and finally walked up the steps because I needed a new spot in my lunch rotation. I figured an HK style café would have snappy service and I was right — I was seated within 10 minutes despite two other parties ahead of me and my food also came within 5 minutes of my order. Which was impressive but made me wonder. I suppose it doesn’t take long to make a bowl of seafood noodles in fish broth.
The broth was tasty, but not the best I’ve had, and they didn’t skimp on the toppings. Prawns, scallops, fake crab meat, and loads of that delicious deep-​fried white fish. It was so substantial that I left half of the noodles behind because my stomach expansion actually reached a limit. I can’t even remember the last time I couldn’t finish my noodles — I am a noodle fiend. Perhaps also the thin noodles were not my fave, kind of bland and hard to pick up. When I looked around at the orders at nearby tables, they were all just as massive.
So if you’re stomach is growling and you just can’t wait — come here. Might be busy depending on time of day but service is quick. Lunch prices are definitely nothing close to HK prices but decent for Vancouver and included a hot drink.

I Café is a Hong Kong style café located on Heather x Broadway on the second floor. Back in the day, it used to reside where Whole Foods and Lululemon Lab is on Cambie x Broadway. I think I just dated myself. Nonetheless, I Café provides a satisfaction for those craving HK café food and aren’t at liberty to travel far. The ‘new’ location is modern and clean. Have to say that the mirrored pillars are more of an obstruction than decorative.
Prices are on the more expensive side and portions are rather small. We came here for late afternoon tea one day and the place was pretty empty.
Portuguese Baked Seafood on Rice: A small shallow stone pot of rice and a few pieces of mussels, code and shrimp. The rice was on the mushy side and flat flavours
Pork Cutlet with noodles: A tender piece of fried pork (we asked them to serve on the side so it doesn’t become all soggy). The bowl of noodles literally done with a few bites. And the soup? nothing more than Knorr chicken stock.
HK Milk Tea: Too sweet and not enough tea leaves.

HK Lemon Tea: Watered down tea with lemon.
For the prices and location we expected much more. Poor. Poor. Poor.