Ethnic Eats – Sampling the World’s Cuisine Without Leaving Vancouver

My sense of smell has been betraying me lately. Last week I bought some nectarines that filled the grocery store -and then my kitchen – with the most amazingly tempting smell of ripe fruit and then dismayed me utterly by tasting like wet cardboard. Lunch today was a much greater offense, however. Walking down Broadway I caught a whiff of complex curry smells and tracked them into an Indian buffet in an office building. I was surprised to find myself in a forgotten restaurant that my mom and I used to frequent. It was an Irish restaurant, I was reminded, after seeing the still-present plaid carpet and high-backed wood booths.

I was excited by my find, and bolstered by both the $5 price tag and my recent Saravanaa-Bhavan buffet success, but the fare was incredibly mediocre. The dried-out naan was no match for the thin, runny sauces and rather than being complex and wonderful as the smell suggested, they were flat and flavourless punctuated with chilis. I tried the butter chicken, channa masala, dahl, mater paneer, and declared that for $5 they were at least all edible. Then I tried the soy chunks in curry that were too rubbery to count as food. I should have stopped there but they had kheer for dessert and kheer is on my list of things to try! I get very excited about trying new things, except I think – unless kheer is meany to be a slop of white gluey paste that explodes in your mouth like vineagar hitting baking soda and then sticks there – that I will have to leave it on the list to be tried again elsewhere

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New India Buffet
805 West Broadway, Vancouver

Ethnic Eats is finally back from a bit of an unscheduled break. I was sick and then I got laid off and while there has still been much dining out around town, not much has made it into words.

Check out @ethniceats on Twitter and the brand new Ethnic Eats page on Facebook and expect us back with regular food posts starting tomorrow.

Thanks for hanging in there.

The theme for 2008 was not ever being home and a huge part of that (a sub theme if you will) included some spectacularly good eating out. I started this post by making a list of the top meals of 2008 but so many of them happened in the last week of the year that it made me seem like I just had a terrible memory.

There were a couple of fantastic meals at Boneta (easily my new favorite restaurant of the year if you don’t count Tailor in New York City) and several from old favorites Dona Cata, Hapa,  Salt and Medina, but it’s been this holiday time that has taken the year of good eating to possibly unbeatable proportions.

Christmas eve started with a spread for some friends; Susie and I made homemade caramel, fudge and cookies, chicken livers marinated and grilled with red onion, Parkerhouse rolls to wrap around cold cuts, homemade crackers to go with a selection of cheeses, cherry tomatoes stuffed with feta, carrot soup and mulled wine kept warm on the stove.

Christmas day was a traditional English dinner at my dad’s place with a roast turkey, Waldorf salad, mashed yams, roast potatoes and parsnips, flaming figgy pudding and lots and lots of wine.

Later Boris and Rachael had a Christmas open house at his parent’s place on Bowen Island. There was homemade creton on homemade soda bread, Czechoslovakian cabbage soup, and then thanks to an underweight fawn that had frozen to death in the backyard, 4 courses of venison. Steaks sauteed rare with grapeseed oil and salt and pepper, heart cooked with a bit of garlic and served on a cracker, roast with dried apricots, cranberries and prunes, garlic mayo and wine (among other things, I’m sure), followed up with venison shank cooked to perfection in the aforementioned cabbage soup. It was a meal that I am not likely to ever have again, and it was incredible. Special thanks go to James for his suburb butchering and cooking skills and to Boris for hosting and delicious cooking as well.

Another evening, some friends and I made gargantuan, decadent tourtières from the Au Pied de Cochon cookbook and it seemed like even before I had finished digesting it, we tucked in to the aforementioned Phnom Pehn eating extravaganza.

For New Years Eve I ate at Campagnolo restaurant (I’ll be putting a review up on Foodists soon) and feasted on seared tuna, fried chickpeas, roast pork and fagioli beans with cipolline onions. Just  incredible.

Even the non-feast days had a ridiculous amount of decadent eating. There was bread pudding with arugula and gruyere for breakfast one day and seafood towers and steak lunches for lunch on another. Travis made his traditional broiled shrimp with garlic and scallions at some point between Christmas and New Year’s and later in the evening on New Year’s Eve made good luck black-eye pea and ham soup.

I somehow managed to not gain any wait through all of this, but only because all of my muscles must have atrophied. I don’t intend to be out of the house quite so much in 2009 – I want to do a lot more cooking for one thing – but this is the short list of places I want to eat at this year:

La Quercia
Vij’s
Les Faux Bourgeois
Red Sea Cafe
Ajisai Sushi
Michi Sushi
Senova
Pied-a-Terre
La Buca
Raincity Grill
DB Bistro Moderne
Lumiere
Octopus Garden
Quattro
C
Gastropod

UPDATE: And now I’ve just made plans to eat at DB Bistro Moderne,  Michi Sushi and Gastropod, so it looks like this list will not be too hard to get through.

I’ve been kind of obsessed with the idea of last suppers (i.e. – for prisoners on death row) and whether given the choice of trying something completely new or rare or exotic one would pick that or something familiar. One friend said he would take the opportunity to literally have something else that he couldn’t have in a normal life – human flesh if they would give it to him, or a Cobra venom sack, etc.  – but it seems that most people choose comfort food for their last meal, at least in Texas. I’m not sure. I think I would be torn between having a favorite thing done exceptionally well and perhaps paired with something new. But the idea of not being able to have your favorite things anymore sticks.

On a similar but less morbid note, Adam at Amateur Gourmet has started a meme of last hours spent in cities. He describes what his final 12 hours in New York would be like, and Chocolate and Zucchini describes 12 hours in Paris. Here’s what I would do with 12 hours left in the city I’ve spent most of my life in.

If I was leaving Vancouver for any period of time, I would realistically need to take a trip to White Rock beach, but let’s assume that I did that on the second to last day because it takes up too much time.

So.

My last half day would start around 10 AM with a run around the seawall followed by a browse through Bibliophile bookstore on the Drive. Book in hand I would go to Calabria for a coffee and Fratelli’s for a croissant and sit and read for a while.

Then a snacking wander through Granville Island, especially Oyama Sausage, Liberty Wines, Edible B.C., South China Seas Trading Co., where I would sample whatever was on offer as well as stock up on supplies for wherever I was going.

From there I would walk along the water to have a late lunch at Hapa in Kits, even though it is substandard to the one downtown. This was a tough compromise. I actually will probably never go back to that location because I just like the other one so much better. But I wouldn’t want to go to the Robson Street location on what I’m imagining is a sunny day.

I would digest lunch at the beach reading and people watching and when the sun started to set, head back downtown. Around 6 PM I would have a glass of wine and possibly the foie gras parfait at Salt Tasting Room.

Dinner would be at Boneta with my closest friends and then to the Irish Heather/Shebeen for several whiskies with as many friends as I could round up. If there was time, maybe a jaunt over to the Morrissey as well.

I have to say that this list made me completely anxious. I’ve always planned on moving away from Vancouver at some point, but I was only able to leave out dim sum and bubble tea and several of my other favorites by slotting them in earlier in my last week.