I have a problem with restaurant crushes. I’ll find someplace that I like, and then, just like crushes on boys in high school, I’ll be unable to think of little else for days and unwilling to consider any alternatives. Once I had (and—let’s face it—probably still have) a crush on my local Mexican favorite, Chavela’s, that was so intense that I feared I’d come down with some weird form of pica that involved tacos instead of rocks.

So it’s just as well, really, that Chau VeggiExpress exists on the other side of the continent, or I probably wouldn’t be able to resist eating there multiple times per week. On a recent trip to Vancouver, a city with a large Asian population, I developed a serious hankering for some pho, that delicious Vietnamese noodle soup. Pho, however, can be a little difficult to find in vegetarian form, so I poked around on Yelp and quickly came up with a review that claimed that the coconut shake at Chau was the best beverage the reviewer had ever tasted. She followed this assertion with the sentence, “Seriously,” which is one of the gravest statements a Yelper can make. So Jason and I decided to fortify ourselves there before embarking on the brutal bus/plane/train trip home.

Anh, a sweet woman in a “Canada Kicks Ass” t-shirt, explained the menu to us when we walked in, which included, among other things, three different kinds of noodle soup. Anh’s family has long owned restaurants in the Vancouver area, and they decided to make this one vegan to match their Buddhist lifestyle. They cook their own coconut cream for the storied coconut shake, which you can get virgin or with rum, and they also use it in their coconut curry.

Though I am vegetarian, I have very high standards when it comes to pho. One of all-time favorite vacation memories is sitting in the chilly open air market in Sapa, Vietnam, happily slurping noodle soup for breakfast as the sun came up over the mountains. So could the soup at Chau compete? Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as magical, but it was exactly what I needed at that moment. The flavors were clean and bright and fresh (which was key, after the preponderance of dairy products and poutine that I’d been eating over the previous week). And the coconut shake—good golly. I am not huge fan of the coconut juice craze, but this was something utterly different.  It was frothy and milky and just the right level of sweet. And it was topped with a sprig of mint and a chunk of coconut so big that it served as a nice dessert. Trust me—it’s a mood-changer.

So if you’re closer to Vancouver than I am right now, go to Chau and go there fast, before you develop a serious coconut cream deficiency. Love, or at least an intense crush, awaits you on the other end.