Vancouver's Top 10 Restaurants

Mia Stainsby
Vancouver Sun


Thursday, January 11, 2007


THE BEST

Rare

1355 Hornby St., 604-669-1256

With moves as fine as a Swiss watch, Rare wins out over other smooth movers like Gastropod and Sanafir and over the downright lusty La Regalade Cote Mer. In the end, Rare's technically challenging dishes, flair and extensive food offerings and wines got my vote for best new restaurant of 2006.

And Rare does indeed serve up some rarities, like frog legs sauteed with parsley and pine nuts and thyme beignet and sorrel puree. To cap it off, their house bread is leavened with a starter made with Seymour Mountain wild yeast. I recall unusual palate refreshers between courses -- a blood-orange seltzer one evening and a carrot seltzer on another occasion.

I had a halibut so fresh and cleanly cooked, I could pluck the fillet like white rose petals. An Okanagan quail, stuffed with sweetbread and sweetened with honey and served with a boar bacon ratatouille, was a beautiful balance of deep flavours.

A french rack of suckling pig was juicy and tender, served with apple and wilted romaine. Beef cheek with marrow and smoked lentil ragout shows Rare isn't all about silky smooth; it knows lusty, too.

I haven't returned since my early visits, but one weak area back then was the desserts. Chef Brian Fowke worked in Toronto before moving back to Vancouver and was thrilled to find himself in a horn of plenty -- he works closely with fishers and farmers and other suppliers to keep the menu lively. Game meat has become a big seller and when available, he buys Nicola Valley deer, wild Arctic caribou as well as fishing bycatch, such as octopus and skate, from fishers.

THE REST

Gastropod

1938 West Fourth, 604-730-5579

Just watch. Angus An will be kicking serious butt. He's got the chef's equivalent of a lethal karate kick. At 27, he opened his first restaurant and nailed it with two moves -- great food, great value. His exceptional three-course meals are $42.50, or if you prefer, you can order a la carte. Gastropod earned more buzz than Rare, thanks to great value and high visibility location. Dishes to try? Oysters with Horseradish Snow, Shallot Reduction and Sweet Sauterne Jelly. Tuna Mille Feuille, which transforms flabby tuna into a thing of beauty. Cheesecake that will restore your faith in that tired old dessert.

La Regalade Cote Mer

5775 Marine Dr., West Vancouver

604-921-9701

For the very same reason the first La Regalade in Ambleside is such a hit, the Reye family's second take on rustic French bistro food (emphasis on seafood this time) is worth an excursion to the 'other' side, almost to Horseshoe Bay, in this case. It's not perfectly groomed or refined food. It's honest and straightforward and asserts itself deliciously: beef cheeks in red wine with potato gnocchi (light as a sigh); grilled whole snapper; deepfried white baitfish; scallop carpaccio and onion tart -- all mouth-wateringly good. Desserts are always a pleasure here and the ile flottante is sheer bliss.

FigMint

500 West 12th Ave., 604-875-3312

The kitchen and bar are doing a wonderful job here. To wit, a buttery lamb with pomme fondant, fennel confit, tomato jam and thyme jus; gruyere souffle with roasted pears, arugula and walnut emulsion; chilled avocado panna cotta with grilled tiger prawns, smoked steelhead roe, celery leaf salad and gazpacho dressing. The bar sends out cocktails with side nibbles, some of which are for mixing into the drink. Even the water comes with a tray of condiments. When I've visited it seriously lacked buzz, though. The Cambie Street construction hell doesn't help and neither does the high price point for that neighbourhood.

Salt

45 Blood Alley, 604-633-1912

It's not as if Salt has an amazing chef pulling rabbits out of a hat. The magic is in the concept and how its played out. One giant chalkboard menu. A list of cured meats. Another of cheeses. And another of condiments. For $15 you order three items from each column. If you order a flight of taster wines, you get a cheat sheet, telling you what's what. Now it might sound like a ploughman's lunch to you, but to me, it's the convergence of a holy trinity. Salt gives charcuterie a glam name. Salt is located in un-glam Blood Alley.

Ocean Club

100 Park Royal, South Mall

West Vancouver, 604-926-2326

With Frank Lloyd Wright architectural bones, Ocean Club simulates Yaletown cool in sleepy West Van. Off a mall, no less. Supposedly, it's for the northerners who loathe crossing bridges for a downtown feel. I don't know if the location quite captures Yaletown, but inside, Ocean Club looks gorgeous and the food is very good. The menu, featuring sophisticated comfort foods includes a honey-I-shrunk-the-food take on steak and eggs with steak, quail's egg, a column of tuna tartare and neatly stacked fries. I loved the mac and cheese with braised beef short ribs. Makes you smack your lips.

Kingyo

871 Denman St., 604-608-1677

Noise and hustle bustle in a restaurant either gives it a good buzz or drives me crazy. Here, it works -- the jazz, dishes clacking, diners yakking, cheerful servers, chefs straining vocal chords with "Irashai" as customers pour in. And to shore it all up, interesting izakaya style food and cool surroundings with hits of old Japan. All-important seafood is picked with tender care and I liked some of the whimsies like the "stone unagi bowl." The server fills a dangerously hot stone bowl with rice, mixes in raw egg and cooked eel. The hot stone cooks the eggs and crisps the rice. Delish! The kitchen sources quality ingredients like specialty salts, Kobe beef and high-quality rices.

Crave

3941 Main St., 604-872-3663

The "best" can be hot without being haute. The menu doesn't dazzle with knock-out looks or a particularly creative menu. What owner/chef Wayne Martin brings to Main Street are his considerable culinary skills -- he used to be the exec chef at Four Season Vancouver before downsizing from a staff of 32 to a kitchen where he does breakfast, lunch and dinner service and scrubs the grill before he leaves. He's hooked on great ingredients and treating them with utmost respect. A Texas flank steak (marinated in beer, lime juice and barbecue sauce) was delicious and the crabcakes, which stand tall and proud, are the same as he served at the Four Seasons, he says.

Sanafir

1026 Granville St., 604-678-1049

The hippest place to open this year, Sanafir sports a loungey bed upstairs and the food comes in triplets of flavour -- Indian, Asian, Mediterranean -- a flight of three dishes arranged on a wooden tray. At about $14 per trio, you're getting a lot in labour and food. Sometimes, though, too many elements wrestle for attention on a plate. The room, slick and modern, makes you look good even at your worst. Sanafir is run by Glowbal Restaurant Group, already noted for Glowbal Grill and Satay Bar, Coast Restaurant and Afterglow Lounge.

Beyond

Century Plaza Hotel

1015 Burrard St., 604-684-3474

Like Figmint, this one's a result of hotel surgery and the operation was successful. The old Roy's Steak and Seafood house shed its tired old-world garb and became thoroughly modern with clean, sparse lines. They hired the Four Seasons Vancouver sous chef who created a sophisticated menu meant to please hotel guests and hip urbanites alike. While most dishes are quite enjoyable and the kitchen uses fresh, quality ingredients, there is some room for improvement, considering the high price point.

mstainsby@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 The Opening of Rare

eGullet was fantastic in the opening days of Rare. Not only was it relaxing to browse and read about the industry after a long day of construction, cooking and development of the new restaurant....I received a lot of support and help through this site.

Here is the original forum on eGullet for Rare: eGullet on Rare

Jamie Maw reviews Rare in the June 2006 issue of Vancouver Magazine.

If there is one restaurant that defiantly refuses the ubiquity of other recent openings, it is Rare One, chef Brian Fowke's new semi-formal. It's housed in the suicide room (across from Il Giardino on Hornby) that recently put paid to Bis Moreno and had earlier killed a slew of other hopefuls.

The location is challenging, but, more happily, so is the menu. For Fowke has sought out unusual ingredients, and together with his talented sous chef, Quang Dang (ex-West), prompts resonant tastes and flavours, sometimes experimentally but rarely without serious forethought and intervention.

Dinner at Rare is a largely fussless expedition, choreographed by restaurant director Tim Keller and a small army of servers. First, there is a conventional three-and-you're-out menu that probes the local larder. But there is also a rapid-fire display of tasting dishes available that fully plumbs the two chefs' a cappella, early morning shopping excursions.

The menu is a jamboree of locality, sometimes pushed with long-distance ingredients. It's exciting, sometimes vertiginous cooking, but with its feet on the ground. And unlike some tasting menus, where stultifying ceremony occasionally outweighs the collaborative plates, this restaurant has got it largely right, playing whimsy over anything too, too serious, and mostly winning.

Our early-spring tasting menu (dishes subject to change; $65 for six courses) began with a solo Kusshi oyster in a feisty Banyuls mignonette, the adze of the wine sharpening the tiny sweet slurp of ocean liquor. A carpaccio of Canada AAA striploin with black truffles and house-mothered sourdough was as transparent as the kitchen's gentle ambitions. Dungeness crab broth, infused with basil, was a neat rejoinder, on first mouthful intense as a first-year Psych student, then graduated in a cap of combinant flavours. A suave bowl of puréed cauliflower soup floated lobster knuckles, topped with smoked steelhead roe. And somewhere, more elusively this time, an encore of truffles.

Then chef delivered little bomblets of Okanagan valley quail, wrapping sweetbreads glazed with spiced honey, and a wild boar bacon ratatouille. A saddle of rabbit accompanied rabbit-stuffed ravioli-both under an ephemeral foam of hazelnut, with toasted adolescent carrots. Delicious both, although the sweetbreads package was slightly dry. Slow-cooked Savoy cabbage wafted our way, supporting confit of veal breast, with macerated apricots that teased of early summer. An equal tease: Waterbrook Chardonnay, a decorous glass.

A pretty plate of pan-fried oysters stood into red peppers and chorizo-induced vinaigrette, a subtle sauce that grew in strength like a gathering gale; it shocked the molluscs to life. It's a sauce made famous by chef Eric Ripert of New York's vaunted seafood restaurant, Le Bernadin. I wish more kitchens would attempt this sleight-mixing in pungent sausage to lift the fish from the sea-and concentrate on complex saucing instead of the grill-and-two-vegetables seen in more basic shops.

Another visit saw transcendent cooking in vegetable dishes that were the sum of their exquisite ingredients, and the simplest preparation required to kiss them hello. A starter of sunchoke was simply roasted under a sheen of good oil. Baby turnips from Evergreen farms were glazed in butter with a strew of fresh herbs. Local morels ($16) were sautéed with a perfume of garlic and a lick of chilies. Each dish was a convincing affirmation of where we live and, in early spring, proof that our seasonal produce is not restricted to the three months following June.

In these two rooms we found everything contrapuntal about modern dining in Vancouver. The Ocean Club follows a scheme of exciting décor that plays a restrained culinary hand: flavoursome food, but safe. Rare One is its diametric opposite: sleekly decorated but hardly avant-garde. Here the risk-taking is in the kitchen and the music is on the plate.

Rare One
1355 Hornby Street
604-669-1256

July 23rd, 2007
Metro Restaurant

Alright, I've finally eaten at Metro Restaurant enough times to talk about it. In most cases, I'll check a place out several times before I say anything ... which is alot more than my friends in editorial who like to write about their experience (especially that of a nascent restaurant) in one single visit.

Metro has a unique concept in the sense that you can order your protein to whatever size serving you want - all you have to do is order by the ounce. From the land, they have Certified Angus Striploin ($3.50 per ounce), Certified Angus Tenderloin ($4.15 per ounce), Pemberton Meadows Blade Steak ($2.64 per ounce), Provimi Veal Tenderloin ($4.84 per ounce) to name a few items ‘From the Land". I have yet to try it so keep watching my upcoming photos but be aware, they always reccomend a minimum 4oz serving.

So far, I'm happy with the service at the restaurant, the food is great.

Great patio and décor and given their central location, they're really going to do well.

Order the Bhajis... they're quite spicy and very tasty. Oh, and tell ‘em I sent you.

200 Burrard Street (MAP)
Enter off Burrard Street or West Cordova
Vancouver BC V6C 3L6
Phone 604-662-DINE (3463)
Fax 604-662-7562
http://www.metrodining.ca/

July 23rd, 2007
Metro Restaurant
Raj Mania

Alright, I've finally eaten at Metro Restaurant enough times to talk about it. In most cases, I'll check a place out several times before I say anything ... which is alot more than my friends in editorial who like to write about their experience (especially that of a nascent restaurant) in one single visit.

Metro has a unique concept in the sense that you can order your protein to whatever size serving you want - all you have to do is order by the ounce. From the land, they have Certified Angus Striploin ($3.50 per ounce), Certified Angus Tenderloin ($4.15 per ounce), Pemberton Meadows Blade Steak ($2.64 per ounce), Provimi Veal Tenderloin ($4.84 per ounce) to name a few items ‘From the Land". I have yet to try it so keep watching my upcoming photos but be aware, they always reccomend a minimum 4oz serving.

So far, I'm happy with the service at the restaurant, the food is great.

Great patio and décor and given their central location, they're really going to do well.

Order the Bhajis... they're quite spicy and very tasty. Oh, and tell ‘em I sent you.

200 Burrard Street (MAP)
Enter off Burrard Street or West Cordova
Vancouver BC V6C 3L6
Phone 604-662-DINE (3463)
Fax 604-662-7562
http://www.metrodining.ca/

Rare worth every penny

RareOne
1355 Hornby (and Pacific)
Mon-Sat 6 p.m. -1 a.m., open for lunch in December
Dinner for four, including drinks, tax, and tip: $400
Phone 604.669.1256
http://www.rarevancouver.com/

I'VE BEEN SAVING UP THE budget and gumption for a while before going to Rare. The highfalutin' philosophy espoused on the restaurant website dresses up plain good sense - like using the best of seasonal local ingredients- in some pretty lingo, and I had wondered if Rare would be too focused on being fancy. Instead, I find equal care has been paid to making the dining experience welcoming. Our coats are taken right away, and our menus have the name under which we booked the reservation printed right on them. The menu takes a bit of explaining, but our server does it simply and without pretension. The offerings change as rapidly as the chef's whim, and on this particular night we get a lovely heirloom tomato salad and a cauliflower soup truly worth savouring. Its creaminess blends exceptionally well with the saltiness of smoked steelhead caviar and is finished perfectly with the sweetness of spot prawn salad. However, the octopus is slightly too chewy, and while the forest mushroom ravioli are beautifully flavored, the pasta is a tad undercooked for my taste. A seared weathervane scallop and quail glazed in spiced honey, served with sweetbreads and boar bacon ratatouille more than makeup for it, and set us up for our mains, which include Cornish game hen, sablefish, and steak. Each dish is carefully crafted and presented with purees or foams to dress them up. We've been taking advantage of the cocktail menu and even pop the cork on a bottle of champagne to celebrate a special occasion, so there's no room for dessert. Throughout the meal our glasses have been topped up the instant they dip below half-full, and fresh cutlery and plates have marked every new dish so we can fully appreciate flavours. It feels like Rare is trying to push the boundaries of Vancouver cuisine, but instead of shoving it down our throats, it's bringing diners along on an amazing journey. The experience can be on the pricey side, but it's worth every penny.

4 1/2 stars

EnRoute - Top 5 New Restaurant in Canada, 2006

05. RARE

1355 Hornby St., Vancouver, 604-669-1256, rarevancouver.com

You may remember this space as the former home of Bis Moreno (number two in our 2003 survey). Its reinvention was eagerly anticipated through the most modern and ubiquitous of viral networks, a restaurant-opening blog, and it now houses the "Modern Metropolitan Canadian Cuisine" of Rare.

The menu's three sections - Daily, Signature and Seasonal - offer an ingenious, affordable six-course option allowing two diners to sample different dishes and wine pairings.

To wit: she receives a yielding sea bream filet with spring truffles, morels and red wine reduction; he gets seared halibut with chorizo and a vibrant asparagus sauce. Cornish hen with spring turnips and almond crème fraîche for her; quail with sweetbreads, boar bacon and a spiced honey glaze for him. An exemplary strawberry bavarois and a hallucinogenic cheese plate are the kind of dishes that simply beg to be shared.

Rare is the restaurant that lives up to its hype.