Owner Stephan Gagnon brings a taste for good wine and good food prepared without fuss

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Owner Stephan Gagnon and his partner Linda Horsfall enjoy steak frites and ling cod at Les Faux Bourgeois on Fraser in east Vancouver. Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

LES FAUX BOURGEOIS

663 East 15th Ave., 604-873-9733. www.lesfauxbourgeois.com.

Dinner, Tuesday to Saturday.

Overall: fffho

Food: fffho

Ambience: ffffo

Service: ffffo

Price: $$

– – –

The name, Les Faux Bourgeois, refers to the owner, not you, the diner. Owner Stephan Gagnon is a working class stiff (a contractor, who’s built some notable restaurants in Vancouver) and he’s got this passion for good food, a fake bourgeois, he says.

“I don’t like fancy things, but I love good wine and good food that’s cooked without a lot of fuss,” he says. His dream of running a restaurant materialized last year when he opened Jules Bistro with Emanuel Joinville. The lively and affordable French bistro was an instant hit. He sold his share last November and recently opened Faux Bourgeois, which has a Jules kind of vibe. There’s a demand for such a place considering how real estate has changed the make up of the east side. At Le Faux, Gagnon partnered with Andreas Seppelt, who’s also involved in Go Fish off False Creek.

Les Faux is an irresistible bargain which is why there’s huge buzz. It tugs me two ways: It makes me pine for Paris and on the other hand, I feel I’m already there. The servers are “classic French bistro guys from France” and they didn’t bring a harumphy attitude with them. One is a trained sommelier. And judging by the animated conversation, Les Faux attracts a lot of French-speaking customers.

On the menu, mains are $10 (baguette de merguez) to $19 (fillet de boeuf grillé). Tina Fineza, chef at Flying Tiger, was brought in as consultant for the first few weeks to help chef Gilles L’Heureux reorient himself to Vancouver suppliers after six years cooking in Mexico.

Our second meal there went swimmingly well — a lovely country paté and onion soup; a delicious organic chicken pot au feu and a cassoulet, all delicious. We finished with a lemon tart.

It’s not that our first visit was disappointing. I loved the ambience, but some dishes needed improvement. L’escargots were tender, garlicky and tasty. Steak frites came with yummy frites, but the steak, although flavourful, was a little chewy; the Alsatian tart had great flavour, but the shell could have been crisper; a wild line-caught ling cod with manila clams and savoy cabbage had great flavour combinations but the fish was overcooked. The chocolate mousse needed a little more chocolate intensity. I’m hoping it was the new kitchen getting to its feet. Make note of the chalkboard menu, even if you have to leave the table, to read the specials. Wines are constantly changing with “a little bit of everything,” and mark-up is “a little less than double,” says Gagnon. (The industry norm is double the retail price.)

And coming soon is Les Faux Bourgeois’ next-door coffee bar. It’ll be a coffee bar by day and an extension of the restaurant by night for large groups. The place is extremely busy, which is a good part of its allure so book ahead to avoid cooling your heels on Kingsway. It seems to me Les Faux Bourgeois’s warming, hearty dishes arrived just in time for Gore-Tex weather.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Bao Biag Chen spins dough for noodles at the Sha Lin Noodle House. Photograph by : Ian Smith/Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER – They’re the bling of our cultural diversity. Ethnic restaurants also are the doorway into our multicultural community.

Given that some 43 per cent of people in Metro Vancouver don’t speak English as their first language, there’s a whole lot more than steak and roast chicken shaking down in Metro kitchens, be it at home or restaurants.

In our ethnic restaurants, you get to experience what is often the result of thousands of years of tradition, history, evolution and ritual – you’re not just sitting down to a bargain meal; it’s cultural archeology on a plate.

And thanks to cooks and chefs from around the world, food in Vancouver has become an exciting adventure of surprises, inventions, discoveries and pleasure, and our chefs have become modern-day alchemists, make magic out of diversity. Now is it any wonder Vancouver has become such a world hot spot for its cuisine?

The challenge is to find the gems amid the ethnic plenty. I’ve mapped out some of the affordable places, the mom and pops serving home-style ethnic foods. It’s most definitely not a complete list and it doesn’t include the high-ends like Vij’s and Tojo’s and Sun Sui Wah. I’ve been to most of them myself and some are recommendations from Vancouver Sun freelancers who review suburban restaurants.

Robert Clark, executive chef overseeing Nu, C and Raincity Grill, some of Vancouver‘s best places to eat, says ethnic restaurants have influenced the industry as a whole as well as his job as chef.

“Early on, it really enabled me to mainstream a lot of seafood products that weren’t typically found in white tablecloth restaurants. I always relied on their ethnic origins, whether it was geoduck, sea cucumber or sea urchin. I looked to Japanese and Chinese cuisines to help me get it on the menu. It allowed me to work with and understand the product and from there, I was able to work it into a more European style.”

Albacore tuna, he says, is a perfect example of learning from ethnic cuisines. “In restaurants across the city 20 years ago, I doubt many were using tuna other than well-cooked. Now it’s blasphemy,” says Clark. “We can’t imagine it being cooked more than rare and the Japanese culture made that comfortable for us.” Salmon caviar was another Japanese introduction, he says.

Today, Vancouver‘s continuing search for a culinary identity most definitely includes ethnic influences, but the clincher has to be local ingredients. “We’ve been able to take flavours from multiple cultures and move forward as Pacific Northwest or regional cuisine using local produce,” says Clark. “Local produce keeps it grounded. We’re still discovering and developing what regional cuisine will be but what’s grown here will be the cornerstone.”

It’s hard to remember a time when sushi was exotic and foreign or when even lasagne was considered ethnic, but I have evidence in an old Five Roses Flour cookbook with a “Foreign Dishes” section at the back. It includes lasagne, strawberry meringue and chop suey.

We’ve moved on since those days, but it does beg the question of what exactly is ethnic cuisine. Italian food is so much a part of Canadian cuisine, it’s been appropriated as a favourite among our comfort food and hard to think of as ethnic.

The same goes with French food – French cooking was the basis of North American fine cooking and it’s deeply embedded, at least in our restaurant culture. Restaurants were, after all, a French invention. (Paris, 1765; a tavern keeper served sheep’s feet in white sauce as a restorative to weary travellers and thereby invented the restaurant.)

Whereas Chinese food once meant chop suey, we know it was an imposter dish and we’re now having a ball discovering the vastness of real food from China – and we’ve only just begun that journey.

And whereas sushi with ginger is the new burger with fries (hallelujah!), there’s still much to come from Japan. Izakaya food was the most recent import, albeit jazzed up, Vancouver style. And not without irony, yoshoku is making appearances in several restaurants – that’s Japan‘s version of North American food.

We surprise ourselves with unpronounceable words in our culinary vocabulary, like rijstaffel, escabeche and chipotle.

And our pantries have become so much more colourful – tofu, miso, shiitake and enoki mushrooms, yuzu, eel, seaweeds, Thai rice, shiso, tamarind, buckwheat noodles, hoisin sauce, lemongrass, star anise, longan, oyster sauce, coconut milk, kaffir lime leaf, galanga root, bamboo shoots, fish sauce, sesame oil, chickpea flour, red bean paste, naan, paneer, rosewater, merguez sausage, chorizo, fish roe, cous cous, rice paper. it goes on and on.

And then, there are the dishes that march into our lives – mee krob (fried rice noodles), rogan josh, congee, sambal, kim chi. there’s an army of them, too.

For most of us, initial encounters with ethnic dishes take place in restaurants. Our first pad Thai, our first bibimbab (What? You don’t know of this Korean comfort bowl of rice, fried egg, veggies, pickles and kim chi?), our first poofy naam out of a tandoor or pho or tagine – the first mouthfuls were likely served up in our ever-expanding collection of ethnic restaurants.

While Vancouver might have the lion’s share of finer restaurants, good-value ethnic restaurants are scattered throughout Metro Vancouver. Richmond has an astonishing number of them, but you’ll find them in any community where immigrants have settled – Coquitlam, Surrey, Burnaby, the North Shore.

These are inexpensive, unpretentious places that might dare you to try something new to expand your culinary borders.

A strangely comforting eatery, much like its dishes

Mark Laba
Province

Dishes once familiar, get a much more interesting treatment. Photograph by : Arlen Redekop, The Province

BAREFOOT KITCHEN

Where: 1725 Davie St., Vancouver

Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-681-9722

Drinks: Fully licensed.

Hours: Sun.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight

– – –

I always thought Godzilla would’ve made a great Japanese fast-fry short order cook. With his atomic breath that moves between a slight radiation vapour to an all-out fiery nuclear blast, he could handle a dinner rush no problem with plenty of time to spare to duck out and destroy an entire neighbouring city before dessert. Which would’ve made him a great candidate for handling the chores of a Japanese yoshoku restaurant. In fact, I think manning the stoves in a yoshoku eatery for all those Japanese movie monsters who might, in these modern times, find themselves out of their usual line of work and in need of a career change, would be a great choice.

Yoshoku joints have been popping up on the local landscape like protected marmots lately, offering their unique Japanese twists on Western food. The familiar becomes slightly unfamiliar with this cuisine, not unlike that nutty uncle of yours who after a few shots of peach schnapps takes his toupee off and does the Chicken Dance.

This relative newcomer to the scene is especially great if you happen to be a foot fetishist. The Barefoot Kitchen’s décor in this neat, underground space consists of large, colourful footprints hoofing it all over the walls. It’s an odd combination of both a Japanese fast food environment complete with a backlit menu board over the ordering counter much like McDonald’s and the clean line modern offerings of contemporary Tokyo with its brightly lit hip factor. In other words, it’s both a little strange and comforting, much like the food served here.

Peaches and I sampled a bunch of stuff and put our taste buds to the test with this hybrid fare, starting with the savoury Teriyaki Hamburg Steak Set ($10.50). Arrived with French fries, carrots, broccoli and a choice of either garlic bread or rice and a second choice of either miso or corn soup. Hamburg steak is the Japanese version of Salisbury steak, meaning ground beef shaped into a steak-like shape, and I found this critter particularly succulent, delicately spiced and tender as a baby calf lowing in the moonlight and with the teriyaki sauce there was something entirely decadent and delightful about the whole thing.

Also tried the Tonkatsu Set ($8.50), a breaded pork cutlet served with a citrus soy sauce, an odd steamed squash-like species on the side, plus the above-mentioned soup and starch options. The breading was the best part of this construction with its gnarly surface texture that, as in the world of snowflakes, emulates the theory that no two crispy shards are the same. The meat might have endured too much of a fry bath, taking a touch out of the tenderness but the citrus soy smoothed things over.

There was also a potato salad in the mix, though I’m not sure which dinner set it came with. Actually it was potato salad and a green salad with lettuce, cukes, tomato and ranch dressing all combined and the flavour was oddly satisfying, kind of like a Japanese white trash recipe.

There are also curry dishes and some classic pastas like the meat sauce or carbonara varieties or for the more daring the Mentaiko with thick spicy fish eggs. The new menu also offers a couple of hot pot and donburi bowl creations including a kimchi concoction and a chopped fatty tuna on rice respectively. For dessert try red bean paste and yuzu sherbert or crème brulee. To Western eyes and tastes, it’s kind of like familiar dishes that have been abducted by aliens. After they return they’re just not the same but somehow just that much more interesting.

THE BOTTOM LINE: How the West was re-invented.

RATINGS: Food: B; Service: B+; Atmosphere: B

© The Vancouver Province 2008