Owner-manager Mark Taylor follows through on his belief that service is everything
Linda Bates
Sun
CRU
1459 W. Broadway
604-677-4111
www.cru.ca
Open at 5 p.m. daily. Kitchen closes at 10 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Overall ****
Food ****
Ambience ****
Service ****1/2
$$/$$$
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Mark Taylor, the owner, manager and self-described “wine guy” of Cru, says the success of his restaurant is due to “women in the kitchen.”
While it’s true that chef Alana Peckham and pastry chef Yoshimi Wada are turning out simply outstanding meals, Taylor should not sell himself short, because it’s the level of service, and servers’ knowledge of the food and wine pairings, that make a meal at Cru several cuts above average.
Taylor, who came to B.C. as a teenager, apprenticed under the renowned Erwin Doebeli at the William Tell restaurant, where he worked as a wine steward and in the 1980s became the youngest sommelier in Canada.
Taylor says it was Doebeli who taught him that service is everything. “There’s good food all over Vancouver,” Taylor says, “but it’s service that makes the difference.”
Although Cru has garnered many awards, both from wine and mainstream magazines, it seems to me it flies somewhat below the radar, lacking the high profile of other fine-dining restaurants in the city.
That’s partly deliberate: Taylor wanted to create a friendly neighbourhood restaurant where local people could get a small plate and a glass of wine as well as a complete meal.
To that end there’s a large selection of small plates — with everything from Moroccan lamb to duck confit to cheese plates and desserts — as well as prix fixe meals. The food is, as Taylor says, not showy. Peckham has just two to three main elements per meal (flavours, textures and colours), so elements aren’t fighting each other.
It was too hard to decide which small plates to choose, so I opted, as did my friend, for the three-course prix fixe meal for $42.
We raved about just about everything — the cool cucumber and beet soup, the signature grilled caesar salad, almost a meal in itself with a whole baby romaine lettuce, tons of cheese and warm croutons. Then our mains of beef tenderloin done perfectly, with a tiny goat cheese souffle and merlot jus; and halibut on a bed of quinoa with bean sprouts and yellow tomatoes, all the flavours blending perfectly. And our wonderful light desserts, especially the refreshing lime basil parfait, which quickly overcame our skepticism about using the herb in a dessert.
Everything was very fresh — Taylor searches out local food and buys much of his produce from the UBC organic farm — and as he says, “You can’t get much more local than that.”
The meal was enhanced by good wine pairings. Cru offers 35 wines by the glass and more than 100 by the bottle, with an emphasis on B.C. wines. All are chosen by Taylor, who also acts as a judge of wine competitions.
An easy-to-use wine list has categories listing types of wine and food they might accompany — but it’s more fun to ask Taylor or another server, who will be happy to help.
