Sunnys Chinese

The order at Sunnys Chinese starts with Husband and Wife Beef — tripe, tendon, and shank dressed cold and laced with chili oil, the kind of plate that announces a kitchen with no interest in easing you in. Tucked into an indoor hallway off Kensington Market, entered through the covered passage of the old Kensington Mall, Sunnys cooks high-energy regional Chinese rather than a generic Chinatown menu, pulling from Chengdu, Xi'an, Hong Kong, Sichuan, and Guangdong on one short, loud list. The whole place is built so the first read is always the food, and the food reads specific: you order Sunnys by the dish, never by the category. It carries a Bib Gourmand.

The menu sorts into four movements — Cold, Charcoal, Hot, and Not Too Sweet — and each one pulls its weight. The cold plates open sharp: fresh tofu skin in black vinegar, bitter greens, and green peppercorn oil; drunken clams; grilled asparagus alongside the Husband and Wife Beef. The charcoal section is where the kitchen shows its grill, running mala young chicken, a Miami-cut beef short rib, a thick pork chop, and a whole caraflex cabbage charred dark at the edges. The hot side runs deepest of all, anchored by Silver Needle Noodle and a mapo tofu that takes an optional roasted bone marrow add-on, then widening into Typhoon Shelter squid, black cod, black pepper beef, dan dan noodle, dry fried pork ribs, and a mushroom claypot. Dessert is its own argument: Blackbird Hong Kong French toast first, with daily soft serve and a seasonal bing fen for a lighter finish.

What the list shows is range without sprawl. Sunnys reaches across regional references — Sichuan heat, a Hong Kong dessert, Cantonese seafood, charcoal work that owes as much to a grill house as a wok station — yet stays short enough that a table of four can build a focused, shareable meal instead of drowning in a hundred-item binder. The categories themselves do the explaining: cold to charcoal to hot to sweet is a route through the meal, not a wall of options. Even dessert refuses sugar for its own sake — the not-too-sweet label is a statement of intent, the same restraint that keeps the savoury plates from blurring together. It reads as a deliberate map of where Chinese cooking can travel, drawn tight rather than spread thin, and the kitchen sources like it means it, naming the farms behind the poultry and the short rib.

Sunnys started small. It opened in 2020 as a pandemic-era takeout pop-up before growing into a full dining room under Big Hug Hospitality, the same group behind Mimi Chinese. Braden Chong runs both kitchens as executive chef, and David Schwartz directs the group's culinary and creative side. That lineage shows up on the plate more than in anything out front — the mapo tofu in particular reads as a dish that has been tuned and re-tuned until it sits exactly where the kitchen wants it. The pop-up instinct survives in the format, too: a compact list, a fast room, an order you assemble rather than a set menu you submit to.

Sunnys rewards a plan. Book ahead, bring a group, open with the cold plates and work toward the Hong Kong French toast, and the meal moves through five or six regions without ever turning into a tour. The group math is the easy part — split Husband and Wife Beef, fresh tofu skin, Silver Needle Noodle, mapo tofu, Typhoon Shelter squid, mala young chicken, and a bowl of jasmine rice, and nobody at the table eats the same thing twice. Kensington Market has always welcomed kitchens that cook with this kind of specificity, and Sunnys takes the invitation literally: entry off an indoor hallway, a different region on nearly every plate, and a sweet finish built to be ordered on purpose.