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Vancouver resident May Tsang checks out the roasted duck and barbecued pork being chopped with a cleaver inside Chinatown BBQ.

This is a new restaurant on East Pender in Chinatown. It evokes the Cantonese-style meat shops of the area’s past, but is also an example of how the city might, in the future, support so-called legacy businesses.

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Tsang heard that the owner of Chinatown BBQ hired staff — two servers, a chef and a dumpling maker — from a well-known and nearby restaurant, which operated for decades but closed after a fire destroyed its premises in 2015.

“They didn’t name it (on the radio report), but everyone knows it was Daisy Garden,” said Tsang, who doesn’t live in Chinatown but is a frequent and longtime shopper who rattles off details about the area — which store moved two blocks east, the physical attributes of particular shopkeepers — going back several decades.

For Tsang, seeing the familiar face of former, longtime Daisy Garden server Mon Yee Kuang now inside Chinatown BBQ gave it instant credibility.