Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

A new Tim Hortons  is opening today at 490 Hornby Street (at Pender) . If you can find one of these flyers you can score yourself a free donut with coffee purchase. Otherwise, just drop by today (Thursday, February 26th, 2015) to check out the "great prizes and giveaways all afternoon". If you're keen on working for 'em, they are hiring, apparently.

It's always tricky to review Chinese restaurants because in North America we expect western restaurant standards -- to be fawned over like honored guests. And some few Chinese restaurants do that -- like The Change . But in most Chinese restaurants, you are treated more like rude children -- mostly ignored then herded out. The Tian Shi Fu customer service experience is quite typical, or maybe a notch down. You can expect to wait at the hostess's table forever. Server will walk by and even if they make eye contact with you, do nothing. Even if they come to the reservations book, you may be completely ignored while they address someone else who came after you. You have to basically flag someone down. They have fat menus with pictures of everything . Yes, everything. This is good. They don't have enough menus to really go around -- maybe two per table. This is bad. Unless you don't mind just one or two persons ordering for everyone, or for ordering to take forever. ...

Anatolia Express is a small establishment easily overlooked from being overshadowed by the big restaurants around Canada Place. Squashy seating but big tables. On the Saturday afternoon I was there, it looked like it was a mom-and-son operation. Price is quite good -- you can get a decent and interesting lunch for under $10, which is great for a prime downtown touristy location like Canada Place. The website menu is outdated. Most of the offerings are sort of boring (fish and chips?) so I recommend going for just the Turkish fare. If you are looking for a wider selection of Turkish food, Anatolia's Gate is a better bet with comparable prices. Kumru ($9.99) Basically a hollow pita with sausage and cheese. Supposedly has four types of Turkish salami. Good amount of meat from the sausage, but that also makes this item on the salty side. Slight heat from the bit of hot peppers. At $9.99 this is a reasonable alternative to a hamburger if you want "meat-and-bread" ...

Saigon Fare Cafe is a surprisingly big diner. It is essentially clean and spacious, but some elements are dilapidated, like a cracked tabletop held together by tape. It looks like a cheap hole-in-the-wall and it basically is. Staff are friendly and the short lady who runs the place and does the cooking feels like your aunt (the nice one). Spicy Pork Bánh Mì ($3.95) Approximately 9" long. This was the special-of-the-day and not on the regular menu. By "spicy" it means pork marinated in spice, in this case, soy and anise braised pork . She did offer to put some chili peppers in it if I wanted it hot-spicy, but I declined. The sandwich was by no means overflowing with filling, but it still works out to about 2½ cheap hamburgers. Slices of meat were quite thick, at maybe 4 millimeters or close to a quarter-inch. This felt like a really cheap eat and just one sandwich was good enough to be a filling lunch meal. Spring Rolls ($2.50 for one, $7.25 for three) Un...

Interesting change to the Bel Café that the counter is for takeout only, or maybe at least during the busy lunch hour. I suppose it's only fair since the server does go around cleaning up after and offering you water -- and therefore is sort of owed a tip. Went by a late-ish Friday (1.30pm) for their hot chocolate festival offering. If you didn't know, the annual Hot Chocolate Festival for 2015 ran approximately mid-Janaury till Valentine's Day, so it's over, sadly. But like previous years, I found a lot of the offerings to be hit and miss, though they were certainly creative. Even at 1.30pm they were packed till closer to past-2pm. Lunch crowd plus waitlist, I suppose. And maybe that's another reason for the counter being takeout only since you might order something "for here" only to discover you haven't anywhere to sit. The sensible thing then is to get seated first, then order. Prices here are inclusive of tax, which is really handy. Hot C...

Found this in my e-mail today from Starbucks: February 13th, from 2 PM till close, "at participating stores", is the World's Largest #StarbucksDate  -- obviously timed to be just ahead of Valentine's Day, when everyone will be too busy buying last-minute flowers or going to overpriced restaurant meals to drop by Starbucks for a coffee. Once again, no special promotions for Singles Awareness Day. (>_<)

President's Choice Sushi Bites  come in 416 gram boxes of 12. Each box has two separate plastic bags of six pieces of sushi, each about the size of a ping pong ball; and a pouch of "wasabi" dipping sauce. There is a "panko-style" breading around the sushi, meaning it will have a crunchy exterior -- probably to deflect attention from the fact that once it comes out of the oven, you will be having hot sushi. The product is basically as picture-perfect as on the packaging (!). That means there really is a chunk of shrimp or scallop in the middle. However, strangely enough, despite the fact that I could isolate a chunk of filling (about 1/3rd of a shrimp in volume), even when I dug it out and ate that filling on its own, I didn't get any clear shrimp or scallop flavour. The perils of freezing shellfish, I guess. Also, no seaweed flavour. The "wasabi" sauce does have a light wasabi flavour -- nothing that will clear your sinus painfully, like a chun...