Popular coffee shop on South Main is now haute cuisine
Mark Laba
Province
Main Street is undergoing constant change. Recently, coffee shop Soma closed, only to reopen as a wine bar and bistro just down the street. Here, Soma owner Jonathan Kerridge (left) and chef Jeramie Adams present Duck Fricassee. Photograph by : Jon Murray, The Province
In the always shifting landscape of Main Street, where thrift-store-attired skate punks are now donning $300 jeans and fancypants merchandisers are selling hip to the disposable-income dispossessed, some fine joints have been swept away in the storm. Monsoon restaurant is gone and, next door to it, the popular Soma coffee shop disappeared only to reinvent itself as a wine bar and bistro-style facility down the street.
Now, soma can refer to a hallucinogenic mushroom or plant, a drug in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the trendy abbreviated name condo developers use to describe the South Main area. You can see it emblazoned on the worksite hoarding: Eat, Live, Work, Play, Change Your Socks, Floss Your Teeth, blah, blah, blah.
I met up with The Brain to check out the new Soma digs.
“Y’know,” The Brain said. “If Aldous Huxley had lived in Vancouver, his version of soma would’ve been pot and a latte.”
“I’m surprised the two haven’t been combined yet into one refreshing drink.”
“Could call it a Hempaccino.”
The Brain and I slunk into this low-ceilinged grotto of cool with its long bar, mod-ish furnishings with slightly retro-Danish curvature and styling, low-lighting in the evening and a wall-sized chalkboard where daily specials, including charcuterie items and wines, are written up.
The Brain began with the daily-soup special. Thai curried soup with roasted carrot, yam and ginger ($7) was an aromatic adventure and a gullet galvanizer on a cold night. I took on the Tijuana Caesar ($9), which bore no resemblance to the original created by Caesar Cardini at his Tijuana restaurant. Sometimes less is more and this Caesar was a tad overdressed, I thought at first, but the whole shlimazel grew on me. Grilled romaine, pumpkin seeds and pecorino-romano cheese, smoked-paprika dressing and hand-rolled cumin-seed crouton is a nifty bit of verbiage, and the contrasting textures and spicy finish of the smoked-paprika dressing was exciting.
The grilled romaine could’ve been a bit crisper.
For our mains, The Brain again opted for a daily special of seafood pappardelle with prawns, scallops and halibut cheeks finished with a citrus- chipotle sauce ($16). The egg noodles were wide enough to be a belt for a ventriloquist’s dummy and, judging by the way The Brain sucked back the dish, I ascertained that it was excellent.
The Brain further slapped his synapses silly with a couple of good wine picks from the eclectic list.
I set my sights on the free-range chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese, cranberry and walnut brioche, plunked in a pool of chipotle-cumin butter sauce and a nicely constructed and very savoury puck of roasted root-veggie hash on the side ($19). This dish was excellent, from the slightly sweet and smoky sauce to the stuffing and, although I usually don’t like cranberries, I gobbled these up.
It’s a small but adventurous menu, from the braised lamb-shank in saffron-date sauce with double-smoked bacon and Macedonian feta mash to the fricassee of duck, to the pound of P.E.I. mussels steamed with fennel sausage, roasted tomato, caramelized onion and Sun God Wheat Ale. My only quibble is that some portions, I felt, were small for the price, although other dishes seemed fine. I mentioned this to The Brain, who was enjoying an after-dinner scotch from the esoteric selection.
“Purely psychosomatic,” he told me. “It’s all in the brain.”
REVIEW
Soma
Where: 151East 8th Ave., Vancouver
Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-630-7502
Drinks: Fully licensed
Hours: 9 a.m.–midnight every day
© The Vancouver Province 2007
