Dine Out Vancouver 2011 - Al Porto Ristorante

Happy to say that I made it out to another Dine Out Vancouver 2011 venue on Sunday night, this time to Al Porto Ristorante (dine out menu).

If you've never been to this restaurant, it's in Gastown near the Steam Clock. Duck down an alley to the entrance, go down the stairs just to your right, and VOILA! Suddenly you're in a sort-of-rustically decorated old world cellar restaurant of surprising proportions.
Presently, it is decorated with a fabulous number of high quality hand-painted reproductions of famous masterpieces from Revival Art (and a bit of a shame they didn't have any business cards for Revival Art handy), but if you get there pretty early and have a look around before the restaurant gets busy (not till 6pm, probably), you will also see some beautiful murals on the walls of the restaurant.

We ordered insalata Caprese (vine tomato, bocconcini, arugula, olive oil), Tuscan liver parfait (liver pate, gherkin, crostini, and a heck of a lot of dijon mustard on the side), veal medallions (defaulted to medium rare; with rappini, caponata, mushroom sauce), spiedino (single skewer of wild bc salmon, halibut, scallops, tiger prawns; on orzo, with lemon-white wine sauce), chocolate ganache torte, and tiramisu.

Nothing particularly special or interesting here, just tasty food prepared well. OK value at $28.

The veal medallions also came with a small bowl of what looked like baked beans in a watered down tomato sauce. There were tiny bits of red meat in it (ham?). The very odd thing was, it smelled and tasted like burnt toast. Very possibly, it was smoked ham that, having been re-heated with the beans, gave off the off-putting flavour.