MIMI Chinese Teams up with Chef Mei Lin for Special Collaborative Dinner

The one-night only event served as a lead-up to the restaurant’s much-anticipated re-opening.

David Schwartz, Mei Lin, Andrew Skala and Braden Chong. Photo: Lauren Wesanko.

Last week, MIMI Chinese hosted Chef Mei Lin for a special collaboration dinner ahead of the Toronto restaurant’s much-anticipated re-opening.

The Michelin-recommended restaurant took a brief hiatus in January for a quick renovation and revamp after four and a half years in business. The collaboration dinner with Lin served as a soft launch for MIMI Chinese 2.0, two days before the official opening.

For the event, Lin, along with MIMI Chinese’s executive chef Braden Chong and creative and culinary director and co-owner, David Schwartz, created a menu that paid homage to the depth and diversity of Chinese flavours. Standout dishes include a ham sui gok reimagined with a Dungeness crab filling and topped with sea urchin and caviar, mung bean jelly noodles topped with fresh cilantro and microgreens and, of course, MIMI’s signature stuffed chicken wing.

Appetizers from MIMI Chinese x Mei Lin’s collaboration dinner: dungeness crab ham sui gok, pork and shrimp egg roll, lo mai fan tart and typhoon shelter oyster. Photo: Lauren Wesanko.

“Chinese food is very communal, very family-style, and that’s pretty much how we like to approach things as well,” says Lin. “[With this menu], we wanted to flood the table with a bunch of different food and serve it that way." And I think that [myself and MIMI’s chefs] speak the same language in terms of flavours, so it was honestly pretty seamless.”

Chong agrees that the collaboration was very natural. “The way she puts dishes together is very similar to how we do. She’s not trying to make it super flashy, necessarily, and she’s taking traditional techniques and maybe putting a Canadian ingredient in it or something. And we found after today, we really aligned in the style of cooking.”

Stir fried snow pea leaves and waat dan hor. Photo: Lauren Wesanko.

Hosting Lin is a pretty impressive feat, given her extensive resume. The L.A.-based chef and owner of Daybird is a Top Chef winner, a James Beard finalist and Oprah Winfrey’s former personal chef. Born in China, Lin and her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was an infant and planted roots in Dearborn, Michigan, where she grew up working alongside her mother and father at their family-owned and operated Chinese restaurant. It was there she learned the fundamentals that would shape her culinary career.

“Honestly, work ethic is probably the one thing that I take away most from working at such a young age. I saw my parents work day-in, day-out. They worked seven days a week, and they only took a few holidays off, that being Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Chinese New Year,” says Lin “The older I got, the more that I appreciated it, because when you're younger, you kind of overlook those things. But you know that your parents are doing it for you and for your well-being, and so I appreciate that the most.”

It’s not the first time the restaurant has invited renowned chefs into its kitchen, however. They’ve previously collaborated with Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s, Bo Li of Fish Man, Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese Food and Eva Chin of Yan Dining Room.

Chef Mei Lin at MIMI Chinese. Photo: Lauren Wesanko.

For Chong, the collaborations are a way to bring another perspective of Chinese food to the city.

“It’s not about ego or working with the best chefs,” says Chong. “When we started MIMI, our main goal was to really show off Chinese food in a way that Toronto hasn’t really done. To me, the best part about cooking is you can learn from so many people…and sharing knowledge has always been the coolest thing for me.”

And it’s clear that the love of Chinese food is mutual between the chefs.

“Chinese food is truly incredible, it’s some of the best food that I grew up eating and I continue to crave,” says Lin. “But I think Chinese food is so underappreciated…people think that Chinese food should be cheap and truly, I think it should be the other way around. Chinese food is so labour-intensive, just speaking on dim sum alone. When you go into a Chinese kitchen and you see that brigade in the back, there could be 50 cooks back there. So the fact that Chinese restaurants like MIMI Chinese can do it with only six people behind the line is truly incredible.”

MIMI Chinese is now reopen at 265 Davenport Road in Toronto. For its new menu, click here.