The best lunch I’ve had . . . go ahead, just ask Peter Lorre!

Mark Laba
Province

At Robbie Kane’s Café Medina, they do what they do with aplomb and exquisite flavour.

CAFE MEDINA

Where: 556 Beatty St., Vancouver

Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-879-3114

Drinks: Coffee and tea.

Hours: Tues.-Fri., 8 a.m.-5 p.m. (lunch served until 3 p.m.); Sat.-Sun., 9 a.m.-4 p.m. (brunch served until 3 p.m.); closed Mon.

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Europe is famed for its cafes, especially those of the Parisian persuasion. You know those places where, once they’ve glommed onto the fact that you’re a tourist (easy to do when you’re wearing a fanny pack the size of France), they charge you thirty bucks for a coffee that comes in a doll house-size cup and pop open a Pillsbury Croissant tube in the back (or, as its known in France, Le Dough Boy Amis avec Sodium Benzoate). That is after you’ve tracked down a waiter, which could take days, sometimes weeks. You could spend your entire European vacation sitting in a café waiting for service. If you want your bill, that takes another month.

Now many places in Vancouver have attempted to emulate the European café traditions, minus the attitude, without giving up the quirky personality traits and atmosphere that just doesn’t grow on North American trees no matter how many you cut down to furnish the place. But along comes this eatery, care of the same folks who brought you Chambar. Like Chambar, it mixes the best of European tradition with inflections of North African and Middle Eastern sensibilities. Walking in I could imagine bumping into Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet mulling it over in a corner plotting to get their hands on the Maltese Falcon.

Aged brick and wood rise to lofty heights, steel bistro-style chairs and a long nifty banquette seat bordered along the top with antiquated gold-flecked mirror for grounding, some spiffy and eclectic artwork hanging that evokes both times gone by and modern living and a clock over the coffee bar that looks old enough to have been checked by Napoleon before he set off for Waterloo.

The menu is not big and it’s only a breakfast and lunch shindig, along with their great Belgian waffles, but what they do they do with aplomb and exquisite flavour. In fact, it’s the best lunch I’ve had since I came out of my Hostess Ho Ho coma and wolfed down three-day-old cold Chinese food.

I tried the Les Boulettes ($13), spicy Moroccan meatballs lolling in a kind of ragout of roasted veggies and tomatoes with a dollop of yogurt in the centre, and a hummus-and-cucumber salad riding sidecar. It arrived with all the pomp and circumstance a Moroccan meatball deserves — that is beneath the funnel-shaped top of a tagine dish. The flavours were transporting with all the rich textures and aromas of an Arabic marketplace — like taking the taste buds on a magic carpet ride.

Peaches zeroed in on the Fricasse ($15), consisting of two fried eggs atop braised short ribs with roasted potatoes, caramelized onions, arugula and smoked apple-wood cheddar. I, of course, took liberal stabs at her food, too. It’s all seemingly simple on the surface but you can’t judge a short rib by its egg cover. Together with the globs of melted cheddar, tubers for texture and onions cooked to sweetness, this dish was phenomenal.

Food as haunting as the Muezzin’s call, this place begs for a return visit to try the flat bread-wrapped merguez sausage with baba ganoush, haloumi cheese, grilled eggplant and tabbouleh or the curry roasted chicken with orzo rice, cherry tomatoes and veggies. All in all a great mix of European charm with North African and Middle Eastern exoticness, without the alarm of being a stranger in a strange land.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

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