DaiLo

Chef Nick Liu built DaiLo around an idea most kitchens treat as a contradiction: that the Hakka and Chinese-Canadian dishes of his childhood deserve full French technique and a proper dinner table, not the flattening the word fusion usually carries. DaiLo calls its cooking New Asian Cuisine — predominantly Chinese fare worked through the French tradition — and on College Street, in the thick of Little Italy, it reads as a deliberate argument rather than a novelty act. The menu is built for a table that wants to share, from small plates to sharing-for-two centrepieces, and it rewards a group that comes hungry and a little curious.

The menu makes its case dish by dish, and the strongest arguments are the most direct. Hakka Brown Wontons arrive folded around pork and shrimp, slicked with brown butter, soy, and a house XO sauce, then finished with the almond crumble that recurs across the kitchen like a signature — comfort food sharpened to a point. Truffle Hainanese Chicken takes one of the most familiar plates in the Chinese-Canadian repertoire and dresses it for an occasion, with foie-fat rice, scallion ginger oil, confit garlic sambal, and crisp garlic and onion. The Whole Fried Giggie Trout lands as a shared centrepiece under nahm jim, green curry aioli, and soy glaze — the dish that turns a meal into an event.

Past the anchors, the menu rewards a table willing to wander. A crispy octopus taco tucks red-braised pork belly into a jicama shell with sambal aioli; a Vietnamese phaux beef carpaccio rebuilds pho from ninety-day aged ribeye cap, braised tendon, and a warm demi-glace; sunchoke dumplings come under a smoked butter uni dashi with fresh uni on top. Cold-smoked trout with pomelo and betel leaf compresses lime leaf, lemongrass, nut crumble, and coconut caramel into a single bite. Even the vegetable plates carry weight — Burmese tofu in a mushroom-and-black-bean sauce, Singapore curry cauliflower, panang fried eggplant under burrata and pistachio pesto. Nothing here is filler.

What keeps all this from turning precious is a kitchen that refuses to take itself too seriously and never gets sloppy doing it. The same hands that braise a pork hock in a grandmother's sauce — Po Po's original, with almond crumble and pickled daikon — also rebuild a Big Mac as a bao, turn popcorn chicken into KFC Popcorn Tofu, and run confit duck wings under General Tso sauce on the Yum Cha Bar, the looser, snackier counter that carries the later stretch of the evening. The jokes work because the technique under them is real: a Big Mac Bao is funny once and good every time after. When a table would rather not decode every reference, DaiLo's Choice hands the kitchen the keys and sets the route.

The personal thread runs straight through it. Liu is the son of Hakka parents who settled in Canada, and what he cooks is, in a plain sense, the food of that household reconsidered with a restaurant's tools. The Hakka Brown Wontons and the Po Po's-sauce pork hock are not garnish on a concept; they are family memory rewritten as dishes a stranger can order. The French technique is the translating device — the thing that lets a Hainanese chicken carry foie-fat rice and still taste like something a family would recognize.

DaiLo means big brother — dai lo, the eldest at the table, the one who orders for everyone and makes sure nobody leaves hungry. It is the right name for a kitchen that treats dinner as something to host rather than simply serve, whether a table is committing to the sharing plates on a planned night out or drifting toward the Yum Cha Bar for one more round. Nick Liu cooks like the big brother the name describes: handing over the food he grew up on, and trusting the table to dig in.