Joey Restaurant (Brentwood)

After a filling 2 PM afternoon tea at Soffee Café, I was actually not hungry at 8pm when I met up with a couple of friends at Joey near Brentwood Mall.

The location is slightly tricky to find but you can enter through the mall entrance on Rosser Avenue, opposite the grocery store.
Inside, it's really quite dim. Even closer to 10 PM when it started to get dark out, lighting was skimpy at the upstairs patio. Otherwise the place is extensive and first impressions give it nice decor but the dim light makes it hard to get a proper look.

Korean Fried Cauliflower ($10) sweet & spicy korean chili miso, sesame seed

When I saw "fried cauliflower" I immediately thought of Nuba's Najib's Special and Jamjar's Makali. What I got was nothing close.
Was the cauliflower fried? Maybe, as it was softer than raw cauliflower, but it didn't have the same slightly-chewy softness and browned taste as deep-fried cauliflower. So don't have your hopes up for another version of the Lebanese-restaurant appetizer.
Tasted like sweet sauce: The chili miso sauce dominated everything, and that is expected since cauliflower doesn't have a particularly strong flavour and this appetizer doesn't have the deep-fried flavour of the Lebanese version.
Sauce really rather sweet, though masked by the spiciness. You'll really taste it when you are down to crumbs of cauliflower swimming in the stuff, so save a couple of bigger pieces for last, to scoop up the sauce -- or simply let the remainder go.
As appetizers go, price is okay for portion (about 2 cups of cauliflower?). But I feel it is really too sweet to be tasty and you are basically tasting just the sauce.

Orange Juice ($4.50)

I asked if fresh-squeezed juice were available and they said yes, squeeze from actual fruit.
I watched them pour this out of a non-descript bottle. It had the same muddy look like Tropicana. I can only assume that the juice was pre-squeezed.
Doesn't taste much better than Tropicana so this is not recommended if you demand fresh orange juice squeezed from an orange. Sure doesn't taste like a fresh orange.

Service was good considering our server said they were short-staffed. Noteworthy was how the server automatically divided the cost of one of our party's appetizers by three, probably because she saw that we were all sharing it. Turned out the person who ordered it wanted to pay for the appetizer in full. This one time it "backfired" (probably more fair to say it was unnecessary), but points for the server paying attention to what was going on at our table.

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 3

A picture from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. I can't remember why I had this couple in the picture, but I do vaguely remember this to be in London, on the first official day of the tour group getting together. Their insistence on my helping them take a picture caused the three of us to be late getting back to the bus. The local tour guide had a "rule" about lateness, that we had to buy chocolate to share with everyone. As it turned out, later in the trip, on at least two occasions, we were stuck on the highway on either a long commute or a traffic jam, and I had chocolate and chocolate-covered marzipan to share. About the chocolate-covered marzipan -- Apparently we were in Austria just as they were celebrating Mozart's birthday with special marzipans wrapped in foil with the famous composer's picture. I'm pretty sure it was Mirabell Mozartkugeln . Anyway, there were enough to go around the en

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 10

The last of my pictures (at least the ones that survived the cheesy disposable cameras) from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. Below is the obligatory group photo. Not sure everyone's in it, actually. I'm pretty sure this one was taken by the tour director, Mike Scrimshire as I'm in the back row, on the right side.

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 9

More assorted couples on my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. An American couple who joked about being from "the land of the giants" -- and with good reason, because both of them were really tall! A cute Jewish mother-daughter pair who ducked out part-way to divert to Israel. I vaguely remember the issue of the daughter being an orthodox Jew was highlighted in France when, to make things easy, she just declared herself vegetarian for the wait staff. I also remember there was some logistics error in France because our party size was way underestimated or simply relayed incorrectly, and there was a shortage of food at dinner. Dessert came as an unopened can of yogurt. It did not seem like they tried to make it up to us later, either. Plus there was smoking every which way in France, and I had a helluva time with that. We were also in a hotel that seemed tucked away in the burbs, and not walking distance from anythin

Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

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