Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

It's the third year that C Restaurant has offered a tasting menu through Groupon . I'd been there in 2011 and 2012 , and This year, the advertised menu was... Compressed watermelon and pickled rind with side strip shrimp eschabeche North Arm Farms beets with balsamic gel and crisp goat cheese Leek-and-potato soup and a mini baked potato with sour cream, green onions, and pancetta Seared albicore tuna with fingerling potatoes, sunny-side quail egg, and lobster cream Pan-seared scallop with braised red cabbage, caramelized apples, and Calvados froth Pan-seared Louis Lake steelhead-mussel coconut broth and green-papaya salsa Cucumber sorbet with feta cheese and black-olive powder and tomato chips Farm House cheddar with poached pear and saffron gel Chocolate cake with mint ganache and toasted marshmallow Peanut butter-and-jelly macaroons I forgot to snag the menu this time, but the advertised menu isn't exactly what you get. There are minor substitutions her...

After reading the article in the Georgia Straight about where to get an authentic New Orleans crawfish boil, I went to Cray Kitchen and Bar to try it out. Disaster. Cray offers three types of Seafood Combos: The Pacific ($20) - Shrimp in the shell, Clams, Mussels, Andouille Sausage, Corn on the cob, and Potatoes Cray-ving Crawfish ($25) - The Pacific, plus Crawfish Crab Combo ($29) - Cray-ving Crawfish plus one BC Dungeness Crab cut in half. There are three types of seasoning: Cajun, garlic butter, and lemon pepper. You can also ask for a mix of everything, and all the main ingredients do sort of stand out. It's tasty. The soup that's sitting at the bottom of the large bowl of boiled seafood you get -- it's tasty . I need to emphasize this because when you read the rest of this blog post, you might think I hated my Crab Combo at Cray. That's not entirely true. I didn't really like it, but there's no denying the soup is tasty. Also, after unlimited cra...

Diva at the Met presently offers a 5-course or 7-course "Persian Tasting Menu". If you've ever had Persian food  and think you know what it is, you should definitely go. This is NOTHING like Persian food. Yet the ingredients and flavours give it a decidedly Persian / middle-eastern influence. At this point, it is very dangerous to give too much away because what comes to your table is guaranteed to blow you away. From the starter snacks (complimentary, and do not count toward the courses) to the palate cleanser to the dessert at the end, you will be treated to dishes that have clear flavours which do not smother each other. There is a sense that nothing is without purpose and everything is exquisitely composed. Plating will delight you with its prettiness, intrigue you with its often hidden-by-layers content, or surprise you with its simplicity or oddness. To show you any pictures here would be to spoil your experience. When I go to restaurants, I immediately order t...

A genuine Venezuelan recommended this place, and in the late evening, around 8pm, it had a few tables of South Americans, so it looked like it was authentic, or at least close enough. I can't say I've been to Venezuela, but if this is the sort of food they have, I don't know if I'd be so keen on going there just for the food. There's lots of meat involved here and plainly presented. Portion for price is OK. For example, we had an order of Tequeños (~4" long ~3/4" thick fried white cheese sticks wrapped in wheat flour dough); at $7.99, it came out to over a dollar a piece. An order of Mixed Parrilla (steak, chorizo, pork chop, chicken breast, yucca & Venezuelan guasacaca ) was $25. Initially it looked like an enormous mound of meat, but it was really a layer of meat over an enormous mound of yucca. Considering the 49th and Fraser neighbourhood, price for what you got was just okay but not really tipping over into expensive. An interesting option a...

The Grand Villa Casino now has a $25.95 seafood buffet (HALF price if you used the 2-for-1 coupons that were recently mailed out). Even at that price, it's pretty decent value as they keep bringing out the crab legs and you can have as much as you like. Look around and you'll see that's what everyone "in-the-know" goes there for. That said, The Buffet does have other items, including (big) prawns, a beef carving station, and a good-enough selection of more mundane buffet items like salads, rice, and noodles. The food is so-so but at least looks freshly same-day prepared. Not gourmet eats, of course, but nothing that looks re-heated either. The mussels did turn out sort of dry, so try to get ones with more tasty sauce on them. The soup of the day (mushroom soup when I went) was very thick and creamy and with chunks of mushroom. Stir fried prawns were largish, not juvenile shrimps. Cocktail prawns were medium to big sized prawns. If you are in very early, slo...

You may remember I mentioned in another post that Leonidas was extending their Hot Chocolate Festival offerings by making it a permanent addition to their waterfront cafe, rounding out their various offerings as a café in addition to being Vancouver's flagship Leonidas chocolate store. I got the chance to try their Boho Secret last time, and this afternoon went back for the even more intriguing Jamaican Kiss (they were out of the special ganache last time). Boho Secret - Leonidas 72% São Tomé origin dark chocolate ( Claudio Corallo ?) , peppermint, tumeric, pepper, honey. Jamaican Kiss - Leonidas milk chocolate, coconut milk, pineapple rum ganache. The Jamaican Kiss was $7. !!! -- I know. BUT, it comes with a Belgian waffle , slice of cheese cake, or one macaron (normally $2). The waffle is probably the safest choice if you don't want to complicate tasting your hot chocolate. I've tried a couple of their macarons so far, and they are quite sweet and have intense ...

If you don't already know, pre-fab Grilled Cheese sandwiches are now available at Urban Fare Shangri-La. They do have a $6.99 build-your-own-sandwich bar , but now they have a selection of pre-made grilled-to-order sandwiches that have interesting ingredients like a vegetarian one with apples, and a "Carnivore" that has cubes of CROCODILE meat. That said, can someone slap me upside the head the next time I order crocodile? I am such a sucker for strange meats, but it disappoints every time. This is not to say that the Carnivore sandwich was bad. It's a nicely put-together sandwich at the high end of the sandwich offerings at $7.49. The thing is, if you're ordering it to check out what crocodile tastes like, you will be very disappointed. It tastes like chicken. It's white meat. Firm like chicken breast but the texture isn't quite the same. Just as bland, though. Do NOT buy this just to get exotic meat. Heck, don't buy it to get a lot of meat, becau...