Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

A good friend of mine treated me to Bistro Wagon Rouge for my birthday this week. Lucky lucky! Lots of interesting neighbours nearby including The Pie Shoppe. Our waiter was really good at describing/selling the menu items, so you'll want to be careful actually not to get too carried away by ad copy. Complimentary Bread A nice retro touch you don't see much anymore. Warm, and butter softened for convenience. Really handy if you order moules frites (mussels and fries) to get at the tasty soup. House Burger ($18) Touted as the best in Vancouver so obviously I had to try it. Composition is nothing too adventurous. Sweet caramelized onions were a nice touch. Fries were great - hot and and fresh, very crispy on the outside. Could have used something more sour as a dip to balance the heaviness of the meal though. When they asked how I wanted my burger I went with medium rare and you can see from the pictures it did come out basically so though the center looks q...

Walked in on an unrushed sunny Wednesday afternoon. My first time, so maybe I shouldn't have ordered a new seasonal special, but too late now. With that in mind, this review is mostly about one particular pizza, so don't judge the entire menu by it, especially the less adventurous items. Bombay Cauliflower ($17.65) mango chutney, fior-di-latte, marinated curry cauliflower, diced mango, red onion, jalapeno, mint yogurt, cilantro, lime wedge. Rated "spicy", but except for when I plucked off a jalapeno slice and put that in my mouth on its own, I didn't find this spicy at all. Dripping wet with sauce, from mango and/or chutney. Way too wet. Tasted like mango-flavoured syrup. That dominated everything, sadly. Other than a composition which wasted all the ingredients except mango chutney, the pizza crust seemed really good and not seared with large black burnt patches or bubbles at the bottom either, which can sometimes happen with Neapolitan pizza. Price f...

Last time I was at Pearl Castle Cafe at Old Orchard Mall near Metrotown, I had a pretty lame tea . This time another friend dragged me there for lunch (her treat, so her choice) and it turned out to be really decent and good quantity for price! I didn't try their drinks/dessert again to re-review those. CASH ONLY. CASH ONLY. CASH ONLY. Assorted Stir Fried Spicy Pot ($9.95?) Spicy but not excessive and no lingering burn on the tongue. Not secretly filled with cheap veggies -- it's a smallish looking plate but they don't skimp on non-veggie content. Two big prawns included. You need to spend a couple bucks extra to "make it a combo" including rice. If another dish has rice already you might want to skip that depending on how much you can eat. Spicy sauce obviously ends up at the bottom. Remember to scoop deep for it if you're having it with rice. Simple yet delicious and a good mix of ingredients to keep it from being boring as you eat it. ...

Peaked Pies is basically two components: A hand-holdable pie + topping. The topping is the "Peaked" gimmick and I'd treat it as such for your money's worth. Peak-ing a pie (up to +$3.50) You basically get mashed potato, mushy green peas, and gravy if you go for the full "Peak" treatment, but you can also get these components separately. The peas are just green peas mashed. Nothing special, nothing seasoned. The mashed potato is also just mashed potato. Nothing special, nothing seasoned, and as a result also terribly bland. Plus what I got was slightly gummy, which is not a fresh-feeling mashed potato texture. Overall, I'd say this is not really worth it EXCEPT if you don't want to splurge fully for two pies and want a more filling meal portion, because potato and peas can do that for you. You do get a good scoop of peas, like one generous ice cream scoop. A bit more potato. And definitely not quite enough gravy even though it looks like a ...

Find a Mealshare Restaurant on Zomato! On May 9th, @MealshareTeam will be having their third annual fundraiser - Tonight for Tomorrow! Participating restaurants across #Vancouver, #Calgary, #Ottawa, and #Austin will be teaming to help fight hunger with hunger! Visit a restaurant for an evening of purposeful dining where every $1 dollar spent on food, $1 will be donated to Mealshare to help grow their program! See the list here: www.mealshare.ca/tft

Until April-29th you can get KFC's "Double Down" -- two slabs of chicken breast meat sandwiching something. In this Canadian iteration, it's a belgian waffle. Should you get it? The baseline version is sauced with maple aioli but I was offered the choice of spicy sauce. Tomato is extra. The drink and side combo is actually optional, so if you like you can just get the Double Down on its own for $8.69. For the price if you're comparing it to other burgers you basically get twice the amount of meat and does work out to a fairly filling meal on its own. Chicken slabs were probably under the heat lamp till assembled and definitely not as flavourful or juicy as a freshly fried piece of KFC. But otherwise the meat is actually tender and moist. It's also unclear whether it's actually feasible to give you two piping hot pieces of fried chicken since you'd be hard pressed to properly pick it up as a burger. The waffle in the middle is tender, a bit...

Tucked away from foot traffic at Old Orchard Mall is Me Crepe. It looks like they should be kaput from the location where they are hard to spot, but they appear to do a brisk take-out business if what we saw at lunch on Sunday is any indication. And pretty brisk walk-in as well. Before I get into the review, to better understand why Me Crepe seems to do well, realize that there are foods that are simple but tasty. Things don't have to be fancy to be tasty! Like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Or a nice cookie. Or a chewy chcolatey two-bite brownie. And if you have a craving for it, you can get sold a $6 scoop of ice cream that supposedly has various attributes to justify how it should cost more than a tub of ice cream at the supermarket. You might not even be enough of an ice cream connoisseur to tell the difference but you'll pay for it maybe because everyone else is doing just that. If you go to Me Crepe and deconstruct the crepe you get, you will likely be disappointed...