Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

Went for my third and probably last Taste of Yaletown 2011  outing last night. It's the Secret Souls Walk  at Garden Park (East 2nd and Templeton) and possibly some poking around the Waldorf's Halloween Carnival of the Souls tonight, so that's it for my weekend. Although there were a few hits and misses, it was mostly an excellent experience at Hapa Izakaya last night. Here's the menu: $25.00 per person (excludes taxes, gratuities and alcohol) Appetizer - Please choose two dishes: 1. Negitoro: Chopped albacore tuna belly served with garlic toast 2. Beef Tataki: Lightly seared AAA beef topped with sesame chili sauce 3. Tuna Carpaccio: Thinly sliced ahi tuna with yuzu dressing 4. Enoki Bacon: Enoki mushrooms wrapped in bacon skewer 5. Bintoro: Lightly seared albacore tuna sashimi with ponzu sauce 6. Ahi Tuna Taco: Sautéed  ahi tuna, pickled serrano tartar sauce with guacamole wrapped in flour tortilla Entrée - Please choose two dishes: 1. Chowder: Halibut,...

It's only 7:30pm and I'm just back from another excellent Taste of Yaletown dinner! Not early enough to avoid the after-game skytrain rush, but definitely not sorry to have had dinner at Bistro Sakana . It's a very fixed menu with no vegetarian option here, but the variety makes up for it. Here's the $35 menu: $35.00 per person (excludes taxes, gratuities and alcohol) Appetizer Sockeye Salmon Miso Chowder -OR- Atlantic Lobster Miso Bisque -OR- Tai (New Zealand Red Snapper) Sashimi with fresh ginger & ponzu sauce Entrée All of: Wild Sockeye Jalapeno Aburi "Hakozushi": Sockeye Salmon layered with rice, box pressed, flame torched, and topped with jalapeño slices Toro Red Chili Aburi "Hakozushi": Albacore Toro marinated in Junmai sake & miso, layered with rice, box pressed, flame torched, and topped with red chili and key lime slivers Yuzu Black Sesame Encrusted Tuna Tataki: Albacore sashimi tataki encrusted with roasted black sesam...

It's time for Taste of Yaletown again! Now in it's 7th year, we sadly won't see Capones in the lineup. That mainstay of live jazz in downtown Vancouver has since folded despite an attempt to renovate and revive it . Another institution in Vancouver has folded, gone the way of The William Tell Restaurant, it seems. I'm just back from an early dinner at Hurricane Grill down on the seawall in Yaletown. Honestly, I've never thought of going in there because of the tacky red-text-on-banana-yellow banner. It just didn't seem... classy? Inside, it's hockey bar with lots of TVs on the bar side, just one medium-sized one on the sit-down-restaurant side. If you pay attention, you'll notice the flickering light of the wax candle brought to your table is inside  the candle. No napkins here, just refills of cutlery wrapped in paper napkins, bar style. The whole place feels more bar than restaurant and trying to be both. Anyway I'm glad I went tonight b...

Over a month ago, I wrote about a Kashi offer by e-mail . It offered a sample bar from their new line of healthy bars, and featured a little come-back-to-our-website poll about whether the new bars were tasty or not. I waited long enough for it that I had more or less forgotten all about it. But lo! Last Friday it finally arrived. The bar I chose from their Fruit & Grain line -- Peanutty Dark Chocolate -- has a nearly standard-length package and is 32 grams. This will end up looking a bit shorter than you might expect from the package. The layer of chocolate sprinkled with chunks of peanut is almost 5mm thick, so that's mostly what you taste from the bar. If you like chocolate, this will be a tasty bar without as much guilt from an actual bar of chocolate. Sweet enough to burn the back of your throat, but not too much. You'll want a swig of water after, though. What surprised me most about this "Laurie Timms' Cardboard Challenge" promotion, however, was th...

This past Thanksgiving, I decided to try some fake meat "Tofurky" instead of real turkey. As a family we've always struggled with turkey -- specifically turkey leftovers and dry breast meat. So I went down to Whole Foods and got a Tofurky. Tofurky is more or less a tofu-based fake turkey meat. It's round (think turkey, minus arms, legs, head, and ass) and has about a tennis ball's worth of wild rice stuffing in the middle. If you get the basic Tofurky Roast, you just get the round of tofurky and have to prepare the baste yourself. The firmness of the "turkey" part is comparable to actual turkey, but the look is a dead giveaway (there's no fibrous look, as you do with actual meat) and the colour and taste is way off. The taste is the worst part -- there's still that mild tang and slight bitterness of tofu. If you're looking for fake meat, this is a poor substitute. It's just too far off. Honestly, how some people say they might mi...

If you're the type to balk at $3.00 cupcakes and look at how you could get four for the same price at Safeway, you should stop reading now. Talking about $4 cupcakes will be meaningless to you. If you are willing to pay for that extra notch of quality, however, then you should definitely consider Edible Flours. As far as specialty cupcakes go, $3 to $4 for a single cupcake from Edible Flours (2280 West Broadway, between Vine & Yew) is par for the course, if you compare Edible Flours with, say, that pink cupcake franchise, Cupcakes . What Edible Flours have over Cupcakes is that you get the option of Soy Free, Wheat Free, Gluten Free, and/or Sugar Free, all on top of natural ingredients and vegan baking . If you're vegan, beggars can't be choosers. As cupcakes go, there are plusses and minuses here, but mostly plusses. The cakes are moist and overall very well made. The icing is very generous, more so than what you get from machine-made stuff in the supermarket (th...

This past sunny Saturday I dropped by Indigo Food (2589 West 16th Avenue) , a raw food cafe run by Lovena B. Galyide, a pleasant Ukraine lady who had only just opened it after two years of teaching raw food preparation out of her home. Her home-based business had grown to a size unmanageable to be home-based, so it was time to expand into an actual store. I'm omnivorous, so checking out raw vegan fare is more of a novelty for me. And since I'm comparing my experience against my own unrestricted diet, if you're vegetarian, vegan, or raw vegan, you'll have to take this into consideration. I had a so-so experience at Gorilla Food and a better one at Organic Lives restricting myself to their desserts , so when I found out about the High Tea at Indigo Food, I jumped on that. I had basically what's in the picture on their website, though I can't say I remember the strawberries. The chocolate on the top tray is in fact made in-house. The list of items is s...