Lai Wah Heen's $8,888 TIFF goose requires three days' notice and imperial finesse

Lai Wah Heen, Toronto's original white-tablecloth dim sum destination, is betting on an $8,888 price tag and a three-day production timeline to sell its most extravagant TIFF creation.

Called "The Treasure of Fortune: Supreme Eight-Treasure Gourd-Shaped Goose," the dish is a modern take on a Qing Dynasty imperial-banquet classic. A whole goose is hand-deboned without tearing its skin—"the difficulty isn't simply removing every bone, it's doing it without damaging the skin," says chef Heyden Sin, trained in luxury hotel kitchens across China and South Korea. The bird is then stuffed and tied into an auspicious gourd shape, steamed for hours, glazed with maltose, air-dried, flash-fried, and finished with an abalone reduction.

Inside the goose: a luxury pantry's worth of ingredients including Tibetan cordyceps, Alba white truffles, wild Yunnan black tiger paw mushroom, high-altitude-grown snow lotus seeds, dried Japanese abalone, fish maw, sea cucumber, and more. The dish arrives with a mound of freshly shaved truffles and serves five people.

Lai Wah Heen opened in 1995 with refined Cantonese cooking and French-style formal service—Gourmet ranked it No. 1 in Canada, the New York Times called it the best Chinese restaurant in North America. After closing in 2023, it reopened two years later under One Hospitality Group with a redesigned interior: enormous golden ribbon sculptures curl across ceilings and spring from walls, marble throughout.

The special runs for 11 days in September. Celebrity sightings aren't uncommon—Simu Liu and Guillermo del Toro have already visited—and the restaurant has four private dining rooms, including one with its own lounge, wet bar, and private washroom.