DaiLo’s Nick Liu infuses nostalgia into new-Asian cuisine for Chinese New Year

Owner and chef Nick Liu sits in the dining room at DaiLo in Toronto located at College and Bathurst streets (Photo credit: Roger Yip).

For chef Nick Liu, this week was emotional. He celebrated the revival of indoor dining and the Chinese New Year in a single evening – greeting the occasion with crispy pastrami spring rolls and tom yum custard.

“I’m a little bit speechless about it,” said Liu, the owner of DaiLo at College and Bathurst streets.

Pastrami spring rolls featured on DaiLo's Chinese News Year menu in Toronto (Supplied).Those ripe emotions are at the forefront of his approach to cooking. When Liu set out to create his new year menu for Feb. 1, he extracted and steeped his dishes in childhood memories.

Growing up in Scarborough, Liu’s parents – his mother, Chinese-South African and his father, Chinese-Indian – steamed fortune cakes and dipped them in salted butter at this time of year.

Now, those cakes are a Chinese New Year dessert feature at DaiLo.

While Liu’s approach is slightly more elevated and involves spraying the batter into muffin tins before steaming the cakes and topping them with a haskap berry glaze along with salted brown butter – the essence of the dish remains.

“At DaiLo, the whole menu is based off of a dish I had as a kid,” Liu said.

Tom yum custard featured on DaiLo's Chinese News Year menu in Toronto (Supplied).The restaurant’s day-to-day menu is built on nostalgia too. While some customers expect DaiLo’s new-Asian cuisine to be trendy, Liu said the moment they taste his crispy octopus tacos – as a kid, he only ate red braised pork belly and rice for years – or, his fried watermelon – inspired by an uncle that’s since passed – they realize his dishes are deeply traditional.

“You can create emotions through food,” Liu said. “It’s one of the most important things.”

No dish embodies this sentiment more than his family’s dumplings, which Liu learned how to make at his grandparents' house at four years old.

Upstairs, he filled dumplings while watching “The Young and the Restless” with his grandmother. Downstairs, he made dough with his grandfather, who automated their dough roller by attaching a lawn mower to it.

At the time, making dumplings was like doing homework for Liu. “I didn’t expect them to be anything special,” he said. But decades later, he’s still filling and rolling dough.

“I think when you do all these things at such a young age, you don’t really realize what kind of impact they are going to make,” Liu said.