Emelle’s serves daily lunch specials featuring sandwiches, burgers and homemade soups
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Emelle’s owner Mary Lee Newnham (left) and catering manager Nicole Burke display one of their specialties. Photograph by : Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
Now I know what Mick Jagger ate just before I saw him at B.C. Place in 1998: Sole, plain with a little lemon.
How do I know that? I asked Mary Lee Newnham. She was the caterer who cooked Jagger’s requested meal, as well as Keith Richard’s shepherd’s pie.
Newnham is now proprietor of Emelle’s, a catering company and lunch spot in a light industry neighbourhood sorely in need of a pleasant little food oasis. I discovered the place when I was returning from a venetian blind repair place. Coincidentally, my husband had an Emelle’s-catered lunch at a work meeting that same week and kindly brought home a paper napkin for me. He liked the fresh food and thought I might want to check it out.
For the walk-in customer, there are daily selections of soups, salads, sandwiches, a menu of burgers (chicken cordon bleu burger, sockeye salmon burger, danish blue cheeseburger and more). I tried the salmon burger which featured a lovely piece of salmon but wasn’t crazy about the bun which flattened too quickly.
Sandwich prices limbo well under $10 ($5 for grilled ham and cheese, Tuscan chicken, roast beef, turkey, tuna and shredded carrot and others); burgers are $6.99 to $10.99. The Blue Plate Special, a daily hot entree, is $6.99.
Every Friday, they have a barbecued chicken special and other days, you might run across puttanesca red snapper with eight-grain pilaf; beef ragout on poppyseed egg noodles and one of her own favourites, the Kansas City pulled pork with tobacco onions. (The onions are cut and cooked in barbecue sauce until they look like tobacco.)
Emelle’s is open early and does the full breakfast — pancakes, french toast, eggs, hash, oatmeal. Two eggs, hashbrowns, toast with bacon, sausage, turkey sausage or ham costs $5.99.
“You must mention our soup,” Newnham says. “We have two different ones every day which are totally amazing.”
The day I called, she had roasted tomato bisque with fresh basil and rosemary chicken with white beans, both $3.99.
And bonus! They’re licenced and sell wine and microbrews.
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EMELLE’S CATERING
177 West Seventh Ave., 604-875-6551, www.emelles.com. Open 7 a.m.-4 p.m.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
