Shuffling after-dark crowds clog the sidewalks of Chinatown, inching, pushing in every direction. Hawkers bang tinny toy drums, competing for attention; drivers lean on their horns, watching the traffic lights change. A week of oppressive humidity has sharpened the reek from dried-seafood stores and garbage-choked gutters. And here comes the rain—big, gritty drops that find me wedged between jostling families outside some garishly lit, plastic-tablecloth noodle house. It’s a Blade Runner moment, Chinatown rehearsing its own dystopian future.

Misanthropy is the aging restaurant critic’s natural emotional stance, but its hold can be broken by action. An unexpected eddy in the multitude lets me duck down an alleyway, almost slipping on wet cardboard boxes, bypassing whole blocks of cheerless Spadina pho pits and Cantonese barbecue joints where waiters wipe a greasy cloth across the Formica and slap down the menu without ever meeting your eye. The laneways lead me south, spitting me out onto Queen Street, right next to the chic postmodern façade of a pan-Asian restaurant called East!

In the past, I have paused to glance through the glass, seen good-looking people sipping colourful cocktails, but something always made me move on. East! is owned by the Spring Rolls chain, and I distrust chains as a matter of principle. The same goes for pan-Asian menus. It’s a lovely idea to braid a dinner of dishes from Vietnam, Thailand and China, but very few chefs can cook three distinct ethnic cuisines simultaneously, authentically, month after month for the masses. Techniques and ingredients merge and dishes become blurred and homogenized. But it’s raining tonight, and I’m hungry, and those air-conditioned martinis look mighty refreshing.

The mood inside is relaxed. Black slate tiles, black wooden lattice over dark orange silk and waist-high ceramic pots create an abstract, Western impression of a Far Eastern aesthetic. The lighting is fashionably dim, the house music a cool backbeat to the more intricate rhythms of conversation. The place is virtually full, the clientele largely of the new generation who see nothing extraordinary about hosts wearing headsets and waiters taking orders on hand-helds. Interestingly, about half the customers are Asian. But not the woman seated at the table next to mine. The only other solitaire in the room, she has just flown in from New York, ate here by chance at lunchtime and was so impressed she has come back for dinner.

“We have nothing like this in Manhattan,” she explains. “To eat food this fresh in a smart room like this with great service, you’d pay four times as much. I don’t know how they do it.” Certainly the old Chinatown prices do cast a rosy glow over the experience. And some of the dishes are surprisingly good. The dim sum are comparable to anything found on Spadina—juicy har gow that don’t stick to the steaming basket, plump shrimp trapped in a tornado of crunchy fried noodles. The quality of the meat lifts chicken satay above par—tender, flattened breasts in a garlicky peanut sauce served with ripe mango salad that plays sweet-tart-spiced games on the tongue. Hot and sour soup is less successful, mean with the bamboo and black fungus and marred by a goopy broth so sweet it hides every flavour except that of chopped raw green onion. The Thai dishes are firmly in the Thaironto mould: pervasively sweet without the fiery heat and dashing acidity of the genuine article.

But the price is right and clearly the formula works. Perhaps this is the brave new world of tomorrow, an alternative future to Blade Runner Chinatown. The owners of Spring Rolls and East! surely think so. There are 10 of them, all brothers and sisters and some of their spouses, led by Thai Kien Hua, the company’s 40-year-old president. He grew up in Toronto’s Chinese-Vietnamese community, working impossible hours in the family’s chain of New Asia supermarkets, until competition prompted the sale of all but his uncle’s store in Brampton. In the early 1990s, Thai Hua and his chef brother, Hai Hua, opened Pho 88 on Spadina, then, eight years ago, the whole group got together and started up what they now call Baby Rolls—their pet name for the spot, still operating as Spring Rolls, though with a hot buffet—on Yonge Street, just south of Bloor.

“From the first day we were thinking long term,” says Thai Hua. “We had certain goals in mind. We wanted to take authentic Asian food into the mainstream without adapting it to Canadian tastes the way Mandarin and Manchu Wok did. Chef Hai already knew Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine, but we sent him to Bangkok to refine his knowledge of Thai cooking. And we knew we had to be affordable and that meant we had to grow. To survive with one little restaurant we would have to charge $15 for pad Thai, the way everyone else did. We wanted to do it for $8.95.”

But the group did not hurtle into expansion. They waited 18 months before taking a much larger space two doors away—the first Spring Rolls in the format meant for rolling out. One of their regular customers at Baby Rolls was designer Bennett Lo of Dialogue 38. “He was such a difficult customer,” says Hua’s sister, Quyen Hua, who supervises marketing for the group. “Always complaining the lights were too bright, like a cafeteria, or the plates too plain. Thai said to him, ‘If you’re so good, why don’t you design us a banner for the front of the new place.’ It was so beautiful we asked him to design all the restaurants.”