Chinese canteenMarkham, Ontario
Hand-made liangpi,
a taste of home.
00The project
- Client
- 三九食堂 Lei Cuisine
- Type
- Chinese canteen
- Location
- Markham, Ontario
- Year
- 2023
Lei Cuisine is a canteen in Markham that cooks a little of everything: Shaanxi liangpi and roujiamo, noodles made to order, Sichuan dishes and Shanghai home cooking. In 2023 we drew it a mark, fitted around a hundred dishes into a bilingual menu, and made the posters for its front windows and the sign along its side wall.
- Mark
- Bilingual menu
- Window posters
- Side sign
01The mark
Three strokes for 三,
three arcs for the bowl.
The restaurant’s old sign set its name in a red box. We wrote 三九 with a brush and drew a bowl beneath it in three arcs — another 三 — with a pair of chopsticks resting across the rim. One red, used flat, so it holds on a menu, on glass and on a sign.
三九食堂Lei Cuisine
02The menu
A hundred dishes,
and yours at a glance.
The menu runs from the cold counter through the wok to soups and casseroles, then Sichuan dishes, noodles and fried rice. Each section is led by one large character; the Chinese name sits above its English, and nothing else competes. Two panels are re-set here from the delivered dish list, with the English corrected on the way — “Work Fried” is wok-fried again.
三九食堂Lei Cuisine
三九食堂Lei Cuisine
Two menu panels · re-set from the delivered dish list, prices left out
03Window posters
The front window
should make you hungry.
Two 36 × 48 in posters for the front glass, one for liangpi and one for roujiamo: the name set large and upright, one line of copy, and a photograph close enough to see the chilli oil.
招牌 · 手工
凉皮
独特配方，口感出众
Signature cold noodles
三九食堂Lei Cuisine白吉馍
肉夹馍
经典传承，口感酥脆
Braised pork bun
三九食堂Lei Cuisine04Side sign
One side wall,
the whole kitchen in a line.
The sign on the side wall is for people driving past: after the mark and the name, only the five kinds of food inside — liangpi and roujiamo, house noodles, rice plates, Sichuan classics and Shanghai home cooking.
三九食堂Lei Cuisine
- 凉皮肉夹馍
- 特色面食
- 盖浇饭系列
- 经典川菜
- 上海本帮菜
05The food
Photographs
from the restaurant’s own table.
Nothing here was staged. From more than a hundred phone pictures in the archive we chose the few with clean light and whole plates, cropped them and warmed them slightly — that is every food photograph on this page.
A taste of home,
one bowl at a time.