Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

A dear friend of mine was having a lavish staycation in downtown Vancouver, and invited me to join her for a posh breakfast at Hawksworth , in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia. I normally don't go for breakfasts and brunches because more often than not, restaurants pump out the same boring fare -- pancakes, eggs benny, blah blah blah. But this was Hawksworth. Surely they could jazz things up a bit, right? One hopes so for a place that charges you $3 for toast (your choice of three types of bread, though). Coffee ($5) A carafe of coffee, which works out to maybe 10 cups. Brown sugar at the table. Your choice of cream or milk. If you aim to quaff the full carafe (probably between two persons), you'll probably need extra sugar and cream/milk. For $5, this is probably the cheapest coffee you can get in a posh restaurant anywhere. (At the Fairmont Pacific Rim Lobby Lounge, coffee weighs in at $6.50 for a single mug, though it comes with a funny stirring spoon crusted with a fat crys...

I went back to La Taqueria last week to meet a friend for lunch. Instead of tacos, I gave their quesadillas a shot. I haven't seen or heard of anyone else ordering them, so hey, why not?! The basic quesadilla has cheese inside. A LOT of grilled cheese. It's pretty thick with it, and on it's own, the $6 quesadilla is actually quite filling and good bang for your buck as cheap eats go. If you are thinking of thin, grilled-to-crunchy quesadillas you might get at a pub, this is far from it. At the fold, it is maybe just over a centimeter thick from the sheer amount of cheese inside. If you peel it open, you can see that they have seared the cheese to a flavourful brown. For +$2.50 or +$3.50 you can add a vegetarian or meat (respectively) filling, selected from the full list of taco toppings. This brings the total to around $9 -- the same as four meat tacos, and it's approximately the same amount of food. If you're thinking of heading to La Taqueria, remember to...

Recently I purchased a Big Boss Oil-less Fryer  and I've been fooling around with it. I thought that the sprayer provided was the main problem because it spat out a jet of oil instead of a wider-area mist. To coat food with oil therefore results in too many pumps of the spray, and too much olive oil sitting on the food. After some looking around, I found a misting oil sprayer at the  Gourmet Warehouse  near The Waldorf Hotel . The reason why the MISTO Gourmet Olive Oil Sprayer works well to produce a mist-like spray, the sort you get from aerosol cans, is the pump action that pressurizes the air inside the container. Despite the product name, the manual indicates that it "can be used with any oil, vinegar, lemon juice or lime juice". I tested it today on the Big Boss Oil-less Fryer, using some McCain Super Spirals and a piece of chicken thigh. The curly fries came out over-cooked and cracker-like, so I'll have to watch more carefully next time for a visual ...

For Christmas this year, I got our family a Big Boss Oil-less Fryer (model 8605), which was recently on sale at London Drugs. I hadn't read too closely about the product except that it was about frying with less or no oil. That was good enough for me to want to try it. After some initial experiments, it appears that the product is essentially a convection oven. A light generates heat and a fan blows it around. There are even baking recipes in the recipe book -- essentially, you are buying an oven. Food gets cooked eventually, but you won't necessarily get the same "deep fried" effect. "Frying" is accomplished by spraying food with oil, and according to the recipes, generally olive oil is recommended. By coating the food with even a light mist of oil, the heat can then fry the affected surface. When you normally deep fry food, it gets surrounded in enough hot oil to cook. Here, you don't need that much oil because what oil is on the food is heated...

I had previously tried Yves Veggie Cuisine Original Veggie Ground Round and hadn't been particularly impressed by it. A friend of mine read my review and suggested I try the pre-flavoured ground rounds, so I picked up a couple from Whole Foods . For the Italian Veggie Ground Round, I threw it in my super non-stick titanium frying pan  with some chopped up garlic and diced tomato, then made some wraps with it. It was on the dry side, so I added a bit of water. Unlike the Original Veggie Ground Round, the Italian Veggie Ground Round did not suddenly massively inflate in volume. Overall it tasted almost the same, except for whatever spices were added to make an "Italian" flavour. The flavouring was quite weak, especially in comparison with the Mexican Veggie Ground Round , but overall the soy after-taste and slimy after-effect that characterized my experience with the Original Ground Round was very much reduced. I feel this was a disappointing product as I had expe...

To me, Bambudda is like Bao Bei in concept: Chinese food re-marketed for a non-Asian market. It's a sort of a niche asian food restaurant. You have "Chinese restaurants" filled with servers who can barely speak English serving people who can't speak Chinese to save their lives. You have bubble tea places serving Taiwanese street food to asian teeny boppers; with servers who may or may not be helpful to English speakers. Then you have places like Bao Bei and Bambudda with English menus and fluent-in-English servers. It's just so much more accessible and convenient for English-speaking North America. Plus the plating is comfortingly upscale, so you are unlikely to think "cheap crap" or "MSG". Which is not to say it's cheap. Looking at the price versus the portion you get, it's definitely not on the cheap side despite being closer to the sleazy part of Gastown. What you do get is Chinese food that is "more expertly prepared"...

Continuing our happy hour tour, myself and and few friends went Glowbal Group's Fish Shack on Thursday. Since the happy hour half-price offer is limited to the Appetizer menu, it is actually quite limited and we ended up ordering many non-fish items -- not even their fish and chips ( which I'd tried over a year ago ). Popcorn Shrimp ($10.50) cocktail sauce Nothing too special here. Use a fork to put the cocktail sauce on as dipping the shrimp in the sauce seemed to just push the sauce around everywhere but onto the popcorn shrimp. Fish Bites ($8.50) chipotle tartar sauce This time around the fish bites weren't as likely to flake as the last time, but they were also firmer and drier. Nothing spicy-hot from the chipotle from the tartar sauce. Fried Oysters ($9.50) chipotle tartar sauce Fried oysters is fried oysters. Nothing too special here. However, if you are unlucky, the odd oyster here might still have some of its algae feed (no, it's not "oyster ...

I had previously tried Yves Veggie Cuisine Original Veggie Ground Round  and hadn't been particularly impressed by it. A friend of mine read my review and suggested I try the pre-flavoured ground rounds, so I picked up a couple from Whole Foods . For the Mexican Veggie Ground Round, I decided to go with the picture and make tacos. I fried up some onion and green pepper and threw in half the pack of ground round. Unlike the Original Veggie Ground Round, the Mexican Veggie Ground Round did not suddenly massively inflate in volume. Taste and texture were just as good and nothing about the product made me stop to realize that this wasn't meat. There was no overt soy flavour and no slimy feeling in the mouth. These features make this actually the best fake meat I've had so far. What was disappointing, however, was the flavouring. Their version of "Mexican" cam across more like a curry in flavour and aroma, and on the bitter side. To combat this, you could try ...

When my pescetarianism friend wanted to try dim sum, going to a regular dim sum place didn't seem like such a good idea since so many items have some sort of meat. I had never heard of  3G Vegetarian Restaurant  before, but the awards and reviews had me convinced that this would be a really decent place to try dim sum. 3G uses simulated meats. Even phoney prawns. For omnivores like myself, this makes 3G a tricky place to evaluate. You can either talk about the fake meats, or (harder) try to turn that part of your brain off and concentrate on whether the dish tasted good or not. The latter is much easier to do if you simply don't look at the meat too closely. Before I get too far ahead, I should probably say that all the simulated meats I've tried have generally not been very good fakes. Some, like Yves Original Ground Round , do a really decent job in many ways, but overall there is still something "off" about it when compared to the real thing, especially in...

It's really strange that Black + Blue can bring out mediocre food -- the space/ambiance is really nice and it just feels so promising. Adding insult to injury is the high-end downtown eatery price, with appetizers approaching $20. But there is just something going on in there that is off because on the Thursday when my happy hour friend and I went for basically an early dinner, it was basically deserted -- whereas Italian Kitchen  (also a Glowbal Group restaurant) across the street had been going non-stop busy since Noon and was slowly picking up as we approached dinnertime. If you're curious about Black + Blue, something to take a bit of the sting out of your inevitably daunting bill is Glowbal's Monday gift card promotion -- Buy a $100 gift card and you will receive a time-limited $20 bonus good only for 90 days. Both go straight into your e-mail inbox right away. (And by the way, $100 gets swallowed up at Black + Blue really quickly...). Try to pair ...

The Lobby Lounge and Terrance at the Fairmont Pacific Rim  serves an interesting and very fresh-tasting afternoon tea involving nigiri sushi, sandwiches, pastries, and desserts. So far it is one of the best afternoon tea services I've had, considering both the quality of the items you get, and the coolly professional servers. Not being an afternoon tea destination on weekdays, your chances of walking in and asking for it are really rather good -- Reservations are "preferred but not required". Just this Monday at around 2 PM, we were just one of two couples who were there for afternoon tea. The few other patrons were there for drinks and sushi. You can sit anywhere in the lobby, including the extension separated by sliding doors. There are three types of seating: For dinner-table style sit-down seating, you'll probably have to go into the extension. Sometimes there are larger groups there, so ambient noise may be an issue. In the rest of the lounge, the most comm...

Back Forty Saloon is a dimly lit sports bar. The televisions are not as obtuse as at Jimmy's Taphouse , which makes it an inferior sports bar, but more balanced as a place to hang out with your friends if you are not into what sports are on TV. Bar-height tables against the walls were uncomfortably arranged, being pushed right against the seat. Getting in or out was horribly awkward, so if your party is assigned such a section try to sit on the outside on barstools. Better yet, try not to get stuck with them and get proper sit-down tables and chairs. Salads are pretty big here, so do ask your server about the portion size before committing to an order. When I was there last Friday I gave the vegan burger a try. Back Forty Vegan Burger ($12.40) Quinoa, cashews, oats, roasted garlic, B40 relish, avocado mousse, lettuce, beef steak tomato, toasted Kaiser. Comes with fries, salad, or slaw. The patty on this burger is actually quite good, with a bit of sweetness (that, or the ...