Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

This was another food cart at the Food Cart Festival last Sunday, which I attended free of charge courtesy of my Elite Yelper friend who very kindly brought me along as one of her "+1" allowances. (You see how marketing slyly works? Being a Yelper has status at popular events and privileges you can choosily bestow on your unenlightened non-Yelper friends... So slave your way toward exalted Elite Yelper status! Am I biting the hand that feeds me? Yup -- I do this sacrifice to awaken you to consciousness! Let the scales fall from your eyes! I did get free stuff, though. <_< ) We started with just a sample of their "The Main Event", which is "Gourmet Macaroni and Cheese made from scratch. It's a smooth blend of five cheeses, butter, whole milk, and select spices combined with tender elbow macaroni". I try to remember to judge food by how it tastes. This gets increasingly harder nowadays when ingredients are always listed because marketing gets ...

My first experience of  Mogu Japanese Street Eats  was at the Food Card Festival this past weekend. My Yelper friend brought me along as her "+1" and we were very surprised to find out there were free samples for Yelpers during the first preview hour before the general public was let in (with a $2 admission fee). Other than the really cute Japanese lead at the food cart, what really impressed me was the patient care that went into the food and operations. It's the sort of vibe you get at a good sushi restaurant, where the chefs are calmly concentrating on producing a beautiful product. There's nothing wrong with just sliding a sandwich into a square paper bag, but it's an extra step to fold a snug sleeve around your burger so you don't have to pull it out of a bag and there's no mess while you eat it. I really appreciate that extra forethought and effort, especially when it comes to food-on-the-go when you might not have the luxury of sit-down space. All...

Trust me, do NOT open up any sandwich you get from Taser Grilled Cheese Sandwiches. Or any grilled cheese sandwich, for that matter. It's not a gourmet burger stacked with a fat patty and interesting ingredients. It's a flat sandwich. With cheese. If you open it up and see what appears to be a skimpy amount of ingredients, you might suddenly feel like you've been ripped off for the $6 (or whatever) you paid. I say "feel" ripped off because it's not necessarily the case that you were ripped off. Sometimes, too much information biases and ruins your experience. Taser Grilled Cheese Sandwiches has a remarkably simple setup. Instead of panini press / sandwich maker , the bread is toasted on their grill. One slice has cheese on it, and to quickly melt the cheese they put a baking sheet on it and press that down with a hot iron panini press . When the cheese is melted, they remove the baking sheet and scrape off any cheese that may be stubbornly sticking to it...

I'd read good things about Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken on Urbanspoon  but maybe the one in Port Coquitlam had a new chef or an off day or what not because my experience really didn't match up. It's been ages since I had fried chicken, so that should have given them a huge advantage from the start. Long abstinence = strong craving, right? I opted for one of the lunch specials: 3 pieces + fries + gravy for $6.99. Two pieces spicy (thigh, drumstick), one piece classic recipe (wing). I didn't opt for take-out and just ate it there, so it came freshly made and piping hot. I let the chicken cool a bit and worked on the fries first. The fries were okay. Nothing special and probably not triple-cooked ultimate fries, but hot and fresh. The gravy was sadly flat. Almost tasteless. I was honestly really shocked. The chicken wing with classic recipe was okay, but it didn't have quite the same amount of batter as the thigh and drumstick. That was so-so. The so-called ...

I saw the Hamilton Street Grill had it's annual steak special (this year it is 8 oz Certified Angus for $12), and I'm not sure what came over me, but I invited our dining group, the Food Bloggers Meetup , to try it out last Saturday... Completely forgetting that I was done with steaks ever since Black + Blue . According to our server, it's been an 8-year tradition, and each year the price was inched up by one dollar... Till it got too much, so this year they reset it down to $12. When I was seated, I was asked if I wanted a drink. Ever hopeful, I inquired if they had fresh-squeezed juice. It turned out, YES! they did. Orange and grapefruit were available. I went with orange. The server came back with a smallish tall glass (that is, skinnier than a typical beer glass) of orange juice that looked suspiciously cloudy and yellowish. She said they didn't have oranges, so would Tropicana do? Honestly, I was annoyed. I specifically asked for freshly squeezed juice, and t...

It's a take-out window! There is a counter on the left. For seating, you could sit on the nearby steps or the single bench up the block. The prices (as of the evening of Friday, June 7th) are 50 cents more than what's on the website. The cheese curds are out of a bag. Not sure how that would match up with your definition of "fresh". My Quebecois friend frowned that they weren't white, but yellowish. Although each poutine has a slightly different mix of ingredients on top of the basic $6.50 poutine, most of the time it doesn't really matter because the gravy smothers all the other tastes, unless you isolated them first (e.g., ate a meatball or a chunk of chicken instead of stirring your poutine together). Unless you are paying close attention to what you are eating, your order will probably taste like fries in gravy, plus a $2 or $3 side of whatever else you ordered. Also, the menu doesn't say, but they all come with a sprinkling of green onion. The...

A place like CHAU VeggieExpress is a great example of why I've been avoiding upscale downtown places this year. Location and ambiance costs you money, but it doesn't always add tastiness. Sometimes you do get awesome meals for your money, but not always. CHAU VeggiExpress is a clean, bright space that wouldn't look out of place in Yaletown or Coal Harbour, except you're not paying for them to be there. The layout inside is a long-table and a long counter, almost cafeteria style community dining. Self-serve utensils and cold water (with slices of cucumber floating inside). You are also requested to help out a bit by taking your dishes to one of the tubs under the utensil station. You pay at the counter at the time of your order. Apparently no tipping is expected, so on top of not paying downtown prices for classy vegetarian food, you save about 15% from not being forced to tip. This past Saturday my vegetarian friend dragged me to a "Vietnamese restaurant",...

Vegetarian? Don't order any food here. Just last Friday I was down at Lion's Pub with some Friday night pub-goers. It was a social thing. But I spotted a couple of interesting things on the menu and figured I'd have dinner there. On Friday nights -- even as early as 5pm -- you can expect the place to be pretty packed. Our get-together was scheduled for 5.30pm and it was swarming with the Convention Centre crowd. And when it's packed like that, it gets hard to flag down a waitress. Really hard. They are not deliberately ignoring you, though: There's no head-down / eyes averted technique going on here. They are just busy. And if you are sitting at a table against the wall, try not to be trapped inside (or get someone on the outer edge catch a waitress for you). It's an English style pub, apparently, and the one person who ordered their fish and chips was very impressed by the two well-battered pieces he got. I was more curious about the weirder things on the...