This post is portion of a series highlighting the concealed (and not so concealed) gems in Vancouver and surrounding spots.
This town is entire of hidden gems with complex, intriguing histories – you just have to know where by to glance for them.
New Westminster’s Waffle Property Restaurant is this kind of a spot.
The unassuming breakfast place, now positioned at 636 6th Street, is on one of New West’s busier uptown streets in a two-storey building. Going for walks by, you’d by no means know the fascinating record of this position or, a lot more especially, the extraordinary girl who very first founded it.
Waffle Residence was started off by Susan Chew in 1954, a Victoria-born Chinese lady who built a name for herself in much more strategies than just one.
In accordance to an substantial job interview performed by the Chinese Canadian Girls project and the Multicultural Historical past Society of Ontario again in 2009, Chew was born in 1927 and grew up assisting her mother and father on their farm.

Susan Chew in the first Waffle Property (Daryn Wright/Daily Hive)
As a young woman, she still left home to open the Handy Fruit Current market in New Westminster in advance of opening up Waffle Dwelling in 1955, which was originally located at the corner of 6th and 6th – just a block absent from its recent locale.
She begun by buying bags of waffle blend, which, she remembers in the interview, have been genuinely awful. After noticing folks throwing their waffles away, she started off taking part in all-around with recipes, eventually coming up with some thing she identified as the “Jiffy-Wiffy Waffle.”
“‘Jiffy’ due to the fact it cooked so swiftly and ‘Wiffy’ due to the fact they smelled so fantastic,” Chew recalled.
The restaurant remained in the spouse and children for 50 yrs, with her sister and then her nephew using it above prior to it was sold to a different spouse and children.

Daryn Wright/Daily Hive
Although her time as a restaurateur may possibly have been transient, Chew went on to have an very diversified and full lifetime – a everyday living she consistently shared about on her very own website. She worked as a vogue product, a qualified hula dancer, and a travel agent, and she volunteered as a Cub Grasp for the Boy Scouts of Canada.
Her name manufactured headlines in 1956 when a constructing supervisor in New Westminster refused to lease to her due to the fact of her Chinese heritage. After significantly public uproar decrying the discrimination, she was allowed to shift into the building just after all.
Chew remaining Vancouver in the 1960s for Toronto but returned to the west coast in 2009, where she remained until eventually her death in 2021.

Daryn Wright/Daily Hive
Chew’s legacy stays in New Westminster in the kind of the Waffle Household, which is nonetheless a place for folks to assemble above a plate of incredibly hot waffles, coffee, and other breakfast dishes like pancakes and omelettes.
The no-frills diner is spacious with relatively dated decor and regular diner fare, but it is obviously a assembly spot for family members looking to get breakfast alongside one another on weekend mornings, an surprising day spot for milkshakes, and a neighborhood hub for a brief and typical grilled cheese sandwich.
The restaurant may perhaps not use Chew’s “Jiffy-Wiffy Waffle” recipe any longer, but the key factor on the menu is still the waffles, with 11 varieties, equally sweet and savoury, to pick from.
These aren’t Belgian waffles – they are diner waffles, if this sort of a group exists, and their simplicity tends to make for a relatively nostalgic expertise. The fruit waffles are generally served with a major swirl of whipped product or a scoop of ice product, additionally syrup and butter.
A person factor stays the exact same: when you go to Waffle Household, you gotta get the waffle.
Waffle Residence
Deal with: 636 6th Street, New Westminster