Sometimes you don’t want mimosas and oeufs cocottes for breakfast. You just want hearty food, full flavours and lots and lots of coffee. If that’s the case, you want to go to the Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe. Started by the DeDutch people it is the same idea but more casual, more interesting and frankly just better.

Their specialty is still pannekoeken,large pancakes with sweet or savoury filler or toppings and at the Wooden Shoe they have 34 kinds of specialty pannekoeks ranging from Indonesian-inspired Nasi Goreng to traditional Dutch Boeren (farmer’s) or chocolate and fruit, plus any variety of DIY.

My favorites seem to be the savoury ones. Curry has been repeated many times, as well as speck and anything with Hollandaise.

It’s a homey place. Coffee comes in endless rounds, served in familiar Far Side and Christmas mugs. The walls are decorated with all kinds of ephemera collected over the years – wooden shoes, beer mugs, reminders that diners over 80 get free pannekoeks on Saturdays and many photos of happy customers. It’s a good way to start the day.

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Wooden Shoe Cafe
3292 Cambie Street Vancouver

Photo Credit: ecstaticist.

So I’ve dedicded to start a new project for dining in 2010. The tagline of this site is “Sampling the World’s Cuisine Without Leaving Vancouver” and so instead of of traipsing around Vancouver’s culinary delights in the random way I have been for the last (almost) 2 years, I am going to present my finds country by country.

I still have a bit of a backlog of reviews, so I may post those interspersed with the project and if I feel really keen, I may even post some recipes.

First stop on the grand tour: North America. Got any favorites you’d like to recommend?