The revamped Gastown room’s mesmerizing decor sets the mood for casual after-work or apres-club snacking
Mia Sta
Sun
Recently, Revel Room joined the Gastown revival of vamping up musty old rooms and blowing life into them. Photograph by : Steve Bosch/Vancouver Sun
REVEL
Overall: 3
Food: 3
Ambience: 3 1/2
Service: 3 1/2
Price: $$
238 Abbott St., 604-687-4088, www.revelroom.ca
Open Monday to Saturday, 3:30 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Restaurants are rated out of five stars.
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I’m too much of a sleepyhead to survive too many late nights out on the town, but on occasion I do find myself wandering the streets looking for a welcoming room with drinks and snacks. It’s hit and miss in some neighbourhoods, and mostly misses at that. But in Gastown, I’ve found cheerful spots that aren’t nightclubs or bars, like Chill Winston, for example.
Recently, Revel Room joined the Gastown revival of vamping up musty old rooms and blowing life into them. Revel has weird opening hours but there’s a rationale. It opens at 3:30 p.m. and stays open to 2 a.m. The late afternoon opening is great for locals who want to escape a stuffy office for a meeting, and in the small hours, a lot of restaurant industry types decompress there as, I suppose, would the apres nightclub bunch.
Revel has that cookie-cutter Gastown look and feel — bricks, timbers, a scruffy handsomeness. No ghosts, however. It’s split into two levels, the main and a mezzanine, and feels nocturnal even during the day thanks to the dark walls and low lights. (I would have welcomed headlamps to read the menu.) I was mesmerized by the metal art upstairs. The two-dimensional works by Roderick Quinn were actually done by computer. Hundreds of tiny stick-out tabs are angled to create hologram-like images of clouds that move as you walk past. Anyway, I spent way too much time analyzing the art to the detriment of dinner conversation.
The menu is a sharing menu with dishes costing $7 to $18. Chef Michael Pacey was most recently the sous chef at Rex Grill but has also worked at Earl’s, Century Grill (gone belly up), Carderos and the Pan Pacific. It’s an eclectic menu with Asian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavours mixed in with down-home Americana.
Our meal on a second visit was much more satisfying than the first; I can’t tell you whether that was because of the dishes I ordered or I’d hit an off-night for the kitchen that first time. The dishes I enjoyed were manila clams with spicy sausage, fennel in a white wine broth with grilled bread. It was yummy. Moroccan lamb meatballs surrounded harissa sauce with a lightly poached free-range egg, waiting to be mixed into the sauce. Enticing. I gobbled up hawker-style chicken and prawn satay on sugar cane skewer and the green papaya salad that came with it was delicious.
A coho salmon filet with tomato ginger relish was cooked longer than I like but it was a generous serving for $13. With other dishes, I felt I had impaired taste buds. Shrimp and jalapeno fritters lacked shrimpiness. Chinatown fried rice verged on soggy and the curried pork tasted of neither curry nor pork.
Desserts had flaws. Once again, I wanted more flavour. If I closed my eyes, the chocolate paté would have tasted more like butter than chocolate, and while the vanilla-infused cheesecake was moist and velvety, I tasted no vanilla — I think the server had more vanilla in her fragrance.
And a note on the elegant, albeit dim, lighting — one of the three owners works in the movie industry as a lighting technician. That huge light bulb hanging from the ceiling was from a set and it puts out 10,000 watts. Instead cranking it up to 10 kilowatts of brightness, they just have it glowing like a toaster’s innard.
