New bistro offers impressive menu, but stay out of the alley
Mark Laba
Province
Victoria Jones (left) and James Lafazanos sample the Nicoise salad and steak at Jules Bistro in Gastown. Photograph by : Nick Procaylo, The Province
JULES BISTRO
Where: 216 Abbott St., Vancouver
Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-669-0033
Drinks: Fully licensed
Hours: Tues.-Sat., lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., dinner 5 p.m.-10 p.m., closed Sun./Mon.
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Restaurant reviewers are not unlike hyenas. We lie quietly behind a baobab tree, licking our chops and waiting for a fresh kill. Slowly we creep toward the carcass, trying to be inconspicuous (at least some of us), wait for our chance and then grab a big hunk of meat and maybe even a drink from the bar.
I was reminded of that image when this new French bistro first opened and food scribes across the city descended in a sniffing pack, each coming away to sing the praises of the joint. As Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris,” but as for me, I’ll always have the rats.
It begins with Texas Slim and I driving through a Gastown alley looking for parking and, spread out before us in the car’s headlights, was a rat-a-rama. It looked like a scene out of Willard. The image was extinguished once we set foot into this high-ceilinged, chandelier-sparkling, white-and-black-tiled-floor setting. Immediately, we were transported via its general joie de vivre attitude into a French bistro, even though I wouldn’t know — when I was in Paris I only ate at McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut.
Nevertheless, this joint is charming except the noise level is so bombastic you need a megaphone to speak to the person across from you. A guy at the next table was so loud I thought he was going to pop his larynx into a wineglass. I heard him yell “sexual deviation” at one point and I thought, ‘Well, you don’t get more French than that.’
“Rather disquieting,” said Texas Slim in his usual understated manner. “I got me a yodelling chicken from Nashville that’d be hard-pressed to impress this crowd.”
We began our journey with a beet- and green-onion salad with warm goat cheese ($7) and a country-style pate with a red wine-onion compote that had a wonderfully sweet flavour to balance and enhance the hefty bulk of this chilled meatloaf-like slab with hot mustard, little French pickles and pickled pearl onions for accent. The salad was OK.
For entrees, Texas Slim tucked into steak with frites ($17) while I took on a classic Toulouse-style cassoulet with duck confit, white beans, Toulouse sausage and double-smoked back bacon ($18). A hearty shlimazel but I found it a tad salty and the duck confit seemed tough to me. Texas Slim found his thin-cut rib-eye in peppercorn sauce satisfying, if a little sinewy, and we both agreed the frites didn’t quite make the ‘tater hit parade.
The creme brulee was the highlight of the evening, along with the beer and wine listings.
There’s plenty to return for, including ling cod in red-wine sauce, duck foie gras in ice wine with beet chutney, snails in garlic herb butter or the roasted rabbit leg with Dijon mustard. As for me, with such a bounty in our alleyways, I’m working on a rat foie gras with bubonic plague sauce. That’ll teach those French a thing or two about cooking.
