Widely varied bottled selection is accompanied by food choices cooked from scratch
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Pivo Public House at 526 Abbott St. is a good place to find a meal before a movie or Canucks game.
Pivo features a variety of ‘comfort pub food’ from Chef Kindsey Porteus.
PIVO PUBLIC HOUSE
Overall: ***1/2
Food: ***1/2
Ambience: ***1/2
Service: ***1/2
Price: $$
526 Abbott St., 604-608-0500; www. pivopublichouse.com. Open daily for lunch and dinner; brunch on Saturday and Sunday. Hours to extend to 2 a.m. in near future.
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If I’m ever in the Czech Republic, I can go to a bar and be right at home. “Pivo!” I’d say and I’d be served a beer.
Pivo also happens to be the name of a bar in Vancouver, serving better-than-average pub food and it’s conveniently within walking distance to GM Place during hockey season.
Good luck on home game nights, though. Pivo Public House is a 60-seater, not nearly big enough to feed masses of hungry pre-game fans (as my partner found on a couple of occasions). But if you watch the game on the telly, no problem. After the rush clears, you can have a steak sandwich or sticky ribs or the popular poutine (made with Kennebec potatoes) and settle in. And of course, when you’re flummoxed looking for a place to eat before a movie at Tinseltown theatres, think Pivo just steps away.
By the way, beer fans, I did a little Googling and found this site for you: www.geocities.com/mosvends/beer.html, with “beer” translated into 78 languages. Pivo means beer in Azerbaijani, Czech, Croatian, Macedonian, Russian, Slovak and Serbian languages. However, since I’m off to tropical Vietnam soon, where beer will be a necessity, I must learn to ask for bia.
Of course, with a name like Pivo, this bar had better have a few interesting ones. It does. There’s about 35 bottled beers, including Rogue Beer’s Morimoto Soba (Oregon). “It’s a Japanese-style beer made with buckwheat instead of wheat,” says general manager Christian Brown. Iron Chef Morimoto was involved in the development of it. “It’s unlike any. Everyone’s a big fan of it,” says Brown.
In the kitchen, a surprise. Chef Lindsey Porteus is a vegan but there she is, overseeing a menu with items like chicken wings, pulled-pork poutine, cheeseburger, Cajun bourbon chicken. “She’s keeping us healthy even though we want beer and burgers,” says Brown.
“Cooking is cooking, regardless of what it is,” Porteus says. “I wanted to try something different.” Prior to Pivo, she was sous chef at Grub, a diamond in the rough on Main St.
“I guess it’s comfort pub food, except it’s cooked with a bit more love,” she says of her grub. “I cook a lot from scratch and there’s a lot more control over ingredients.” However, she says, she found customers preferred frozen pre-made burger patties to the ones made in-house. “I totally thought they were going to do well,” she says of her freshly made burgers.
Well, I totally liked her chicken sliders with hickory bacon (hard to picture her frying up bacon, somehow), horseradish, cheddar and barbecue sauce.
She slipped some pancetta into the aged cheddar perogies, making it toothsome for carnivores; roasted garlic and spinach hummus screamed health-for-you. When one orders prawn linguine (with capers, white wine and butter) in a pub, it’s with the understanding that the prawns will be rubbery and the noodles limp — that wasn’t the case here. The dish was strewn with fresh prawns, cooked just right.
However, the steak sandwich, despite the certified Angus beef inside, was chewy. And flatbread pizza (with artichokes, prosciutto, caramelized onions and feta) was thin on topping and more bread than pizza.
Next time I need to eat before or after a movie at Tinseltown, I’ll be back.
But can I ask one thing of management? The menu — I must have left my nose mark on it trying to read the faint orange print over the green background. At next printing, can you ditch the orange and go to black?
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