Change of pace for former Gastropod chef/owner provides a dance of flavours

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Customers gather at the bar at Maenam restaurant, the most sophisticated Thai restaurant in the city.

MAENAM

Overall: 3 1/2

Food: 3 1/2

Ambience: 3 1/2

Service: 3 1/2

Price: $$

1938 West Fourth Ave., 604-730-5579. www.maenam.ca.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Restaurants are rated out of five stars.

– – –

Maybe it was the news that Michael Jackson had died, but it was one of those fuddled-duddled-up days. I accidentally, irretrievably deleted some interview notes from my computer. The interview was with Angus An, chef/owner of Maenam. Sadly, I have a co-dependent relationship with my computer. It provides brain support services and I, in turn, save the old clunker from the scrap-yard vultures. Anyway, thank you, Angus, for redoing the interview.

An, as you might know, ran Gastropod and was considered worthy of an invite from the esteemed James Beard Foundation to strut his stuff for New York food wonks. (Pino Posteraro, of Cioppino’s, was an honoured guest chef at the Foundation last week.) An and his Thai-born wife Kate (the couple recently got married) met at the one-Michelin star Nahm Thai restaurant in London and they’d planned to one day open a Thai restaurant. The recession prodded them to nuke Gastropod and its foams and foie gras (which only invited militancy from an animal rights group) and to reopen as the price-friendly Maenam Thai restaurant.

While his experience at Nahm is evident at Maenam, An can’t replicate his mentor’s moves on a budget-wary price point. The most expensive dish on the current menu — smoked duck red curry — is $18. Dishes are more artful and served in smaller portions than in local Thai restaurants. Culinarily, there’s more of an attempt to get to the bottom (or should I say apex?) of Thai cookery. It is, in looks and in the dance of flavours, the most sophisticated Thai restaurant in the city.

Some dishes pack heat — more than mild-mannered palates can tolerate. The Scoville count on the green curry halibut was high enough to carpet-bomb my mouth, wounding my taste buds and leaving my tongue to yelp “ouch! ouch! ouch!” That dish, by the way, features pea eggplants, baby Thai eggplants that could be mistaken for big capers.

“Watch out for the Scuds!” a server warned as she set the Thai sausages before us. Good thing we caught her reference to Scud missiles. After the decommissioning process, the fermented sausages (served with flair on a pandan leaf with a sweet chili dip) were delicious. And the sweetness in the chili dip squelched the heat.

For the pad Thai, An sourced fresh rice noodles in Los Angeles — they’re semi-dried because totally fresh would be too limp and pasty. The dish isn’t as sweet as many versions are, a guarantee that it’s tamarind, not catsup, flavouring the sauce.

The “cloud” in cloudy hot sour prawn soup is condensed milk. “It brings flavour, more body,” An says. The prawns were perfect and shallots, garlic, chili and dried shrimp add wonderful layers to the broth. It’s served in a dramatic metal tubular bowl with a hollow pedestal leg, which holds a burner to keep the soup hot. It’s impossible to scoop up the bottom portion of the soup and you have to avoid touching the hot metal.

Panaeng beef with peanuts, nutmeg and basil looked like a small serving, but has a huge, assertive personality. An balances salty and sweet in humming harmony in this dish. Crispy pork belly with green peppercorns and red curry paste is a different take for diners accustomed to letting the pork belly be the star. After an initial wavering about the curry, I liked it. Hangar steak salad was delicious, the steak lively with mint, cilantro, chili powder and, I think, lemongrass.

As for desserts, a chocolate pot de creme was delicious fun — an oval of tamarind semi-freddo sits atop a delicate tuile, which sits across the top of the dessert cup with chocolate pot de creme; break the tuile and the semi-freddo tumbles into the pudding. Or, as it was related to us, you can carefully eat it layer by layer. Typically Thai, even dessert has a balance of sweet with savoury. In this case, it’s sea salt. Really good.

A creamy rice pudding with mango coconut cream puree loves the contrast of black sesame seeds. However, banana and black sesame budino with coconut cream, caramel, toasted sesame and fried shallots requires a wide-open mind. Budino as I’ve known it is an Italian pudding. Here, it’s like a pale, steamed banana cake and the “something savoury” is fried shallots, the strongest flavour component. Sorry. Not a winner.

Service is almost at the former Gastropod level and many of the staff are from those days. Tables are well-tended even when the restaurant is fully booked. A floor-model air conditioner, with a Slinky-like tube attached to it, wasn’t the most pleasant thing to have next to our table, by the door to the kitchen — we’d scored the worst table in the house that evening.

This is the best beverage list to be found in a Vancouver Thai restaurant, with compatible German wines, aperitifs, grappa, sherry, port, dessert wines and some great beers.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Brother and sister combination deliver a wide range of dishes for lunch and dinner

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Golden Garden Vietnamese Cuisine owner Melvin Quach with a curry chicken with rice vermicelli soup. Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

GOLDEN GARDEN

509 Main St., Vancouver

604-685-5623

Open daily from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

– – –

A trip to Vietnam planned for this fall has me on high alert for Vietnamese restaurants. And that’s a very good thing because it’s my second favourite Asian food (the first being Japanese) and pho is one of my favourite comfort foods. Golden Garden was a suggestion from The Sun’s Asian food writer, Nathan Fong, who has better radar than me when it comes to Asian restaurants.

More often than not, once you start talking to owners of Vietnamese restaurants, you find they fled Vietnam under terrible circumstances after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Melvin and Kim Quach, the brother and sister who operate Golden Garden, are no different. (Another brother runs Asia Market on Hastings at Gore St.)

The restaurant is on the border of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, a block south of the Carnegie Centre. Melvin says lunch is busy with Chinatown shoppers and office workers dropping in from the neighbourhood. Not so with dinner, though. “Write about I have lots of dishes for dinner,” he says in creative English. “Make more people come.” Well, honestly, you could do worse than pay $6 or $7 for a big bowl of delicious pho or $4 for a Vietnamese sub sandwich (banh mi).

When we visited for dinner, tables were occupied by single diners reading books, a family, and a few couples.

The restaurant got its start 18 years ago as Kim’s Saigon Sandwich, which explains why the name’s still on the sign, along with Golden Garden. It’s a handy advertisement for the uniquely Vietnamese sub sandwiches, banh mi, which means ‘bread,’ a legacy of French colonial rule.

When Melvin joined his sister in the business a year and a half ago, he expanded the menu with family dishes. “More than a hundred,” Melvin says when I ask how many dishes there are. I only grazed the surface of his offerings and of what I tried, I’d recommend the comga hai nan, a cold, steamed free-range chicken dish with two hot dips on the side and a rice. A good deal for $9, wouldn’t you say?

The Vietnamese crepe, like Indian dosa, looks a few sizes too big for its plate. It’s filled with a couple of fresh prawns, a fistful of bean sprouts and basil as well as cucumber and lettuce — refreshing for a summer meal.

The baguette for the banh mi wouldn’t impress the French and some fresh basil or pickled carrots would be nice but I don’t expect perfection for $4 (or $3.25 for take-out). My chicken banh mi featured spicy chopped chicken, and there are five other fillings to choose from.

The pho is delicious with a light broth made from beef bones, beef (flank), ginger, and other spices and simmered for a day. I detected a hint of anise.

The hard-working immigrant family, like so many in the restaurant industry, adds so much to this city.

If you’re in the neighbourhood or passing through and you’re hungry, just as Quach said, he has lots for dinner and at such agreeable prices.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Simple and delicious homestyle foods help us get through the tough times

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Owner/cook Mike Jeffs of the Nook Restaurant in Vancouver cooks an Italian sausage pizza in a wood stone oven. Nook provides a great neighbourhood place with a laid-back attitude. Photograph by: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

NOOK

Overall: 3 1/2

Food: 3 1/2

Ambience: 3 1/2

Service: 3 1/2

Price: $$

781 Denman St.; 604-568-4554

www.nookrestraurant.ca.

Open Monday to Saturday for dinner; lunch Tuesday to Saturday.

– – –

There’s nothing like hard times to head-butt fine diners into the thrifty category. It’s a good time to shift into a “less is more” lifestyle.

Nook fits that market. Although this little Italian boite on Denman Street just opened a few weeks ago, it feels lived-in and confident. Could it be the straightforward pasta and pizza menu? Or the Neil Young, Talking Heads and Stones making you tap your toes?

“I owned Tapastree for 12 years. I was a little bored,” says owner-chef Mike Jeffs.

“I wanted to cook what I like to eat and cook. That was the inspiration for it.”

Tapastree was one of the first of the non-Spanish tapas restaurants in Vancouver; it’s a couple of blocks away and has had a loyal following for those dozen years.

Other than the pasta and pizza mains, there’s a handful of crostini, antipasto and salad options. Pastas and pizzas are $13 to $15 and there are daily specials chalked on a board.

That’s where I found pizzas with a pinch of intrigue — one with ricotta/roasted garlic/onion/roasted Campari tomatoes and another with pancetta/egg/asparagus.

Jeffs declares he does nothing special in making the pizza dough and uses a recipe that came with the pizza oven, but it’s pretty darn good for “nothing special.” It’s thin crust without being hard and cracker-like. It’s got chew and comes out of the gas-fired pizza oven with artisanal humps and bumps.

Pastas are simple but delicious. The noodles aren’t house-made (unless they have ravioli on special) but he uses a high-end brand. Saucing is controlled; that is, there’s just enough to coat the noodles.

The spicy spaghetti puttanesca with tomatoes, anchovies, capers and olives lives up to its name (“whore’s spaghetti” in Italian). Orecchiette (“ear” pasta) with Italian sausage, fennel, rapini and chilis turned out to be butterflies (farfalle) but was enjoyable all the same.

Jeffs isn’t much of a pitchman. He uses organic as much as possible but there’s no mention of it until I ask. And he uses locally produced Golden Eleni olive oil which I see sells online for $30 for 500 millilitres.

He’s never been to Italy, but takes “inspiration” from southern Italy. So he hasn’t worked for months on the perfect pizza dough. So he hasn’t visited the Italian source of gorgeous pastas. I don’t know if he needs to.

For what Nook is — a great neighbourhood place for supper — he’s doing a great job.

“I’m trying out different things for the menu. I’m not a well-organized guy. But people kept asking for a menu so I did it off the top of my head,” he says.

The laid-back attitude seems to serve him well, winning him another loyal following.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Lively location adds to the flavour

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Burrard Bridge Marine restaurant is known for its nautical theme and the pirate antiques around the room. Photograph by: Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun

BURRARD BRIDGE MARINE BAR AND GRILL

1012 Beach Ave.

604-676-2337.

Open for lunch and dinner Monday to Friday; brunch, lunch and dinner on weekends.

www.burrardbridge.com.

– – –

A prince is due to arrive shortly and Daniel Frankel is changing into a suit. Police are peppering him with questions. And, yeah, sure, he’s got time to talk to me on the phone.

Ah, another day in the complicated life of a guy who swore he’d never be a restaurateur but ended up with a collection of five. That includes Prospect Point Restaurant where Prince Edward stopped by recently after a flag unveiling at the Point nearby. Frankel’s other restaurants are Mill Marine Bistro, Stanley‘s Bar and Grill (in Stanley Park), and Delilah’s and he’s not done yet. “Just starting,” he says.

On the website for Burrard Bridge Marine Bar and Grill, his latest project, you’ll see a photo of a young boy sitting on a pile of timbers. That’s Frankel as a young boy in 1980 “helping” his parents build Bridges restaurant, which they still own with the same core of partners.

Burrard Bridge Marine Bar is right across False Creek with a ringside view of the water. “Now their son is in competition right across the creek,” Frankel chuckles. “I’m going to do some guerrilla marketing and hand out Aquabus Ferry passes to people in the Bridges lineup and invite them to come and dine with us.”

Locals have dubbed Burrard Bridge Marine Bar “The Pirate Club” for the nautical and pirate antiques around the room which hugs a curve along False Creek. “If I were running a pirate club, I’d have rum on the menu,” my husband quite rightly noted.

The main attraction is the patio in the shadow of the massive legs of the real Burrard Bridge, standing like a Gulliver in Lilliput. The seawall skirts the patio and on a fine sunny day, there’s a moving sidewalk of Rollerbladers, cyclists, baby strollers, walkers, runners and skate-boarders. It’s not just a pub; most people are eating, although a few guys are nursing a beer and catching a game inside. I caught Harry Kambolis on a break from his nearby restaurants C and Nu, watching hockey one day. The food is casual and affordable. The triple-A sirloin burger with bacon and cheddar cheese and fries is worth a trip. The fries weren’t stellar, but it seems like we finished up two side orders. (A second order came with my mussels in white wine broth.)

Seafood generally isn’t the strength of a pub menu, but here it’s fresh and Oceanwise (a sustainable seafood program in the restaurant industry). The mussels were fresh but the broth didn’t do any favours by being overly salty. Grilled halibut, too, was nice and fresh and came with hurriedly cooked veggies. A bountiful bowl of greens was crisp and fresh; spicy shrimp and pesto pizza was overly exuberant with the spice. I would have left the shrimp and pesto in peace.

The table of three guys next to us ordered the “one-pound bucket of peel’n’eat shrimp” and I ogled the fresh pile of fresh prawns on ice (shell-on) and coveted them. It would have tasted so refreshing with a glass of wine, sitting in the breeze by the water.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

More casual atmosphere does not take away from the quality of the food

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Chef Rod Butters from Raudz Regional Table restaurant in kelowna. PHOTS FROM RAUDZ WEBSITE

Signature crab cake from Raudz Regional Table.

RAUDZ REGIONAL TABLE

Overall: ****1/2

Food: ****1/2

Ambience: ****1/2

Service: ***1/2

Price: $$

1560 Water St., Kelowna

250-868-8805

www.raudz.com.

Open daily for dinner.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

– – –

I make at least a trip a year to the Okanagan to keep pace with what’s going on. Wineries boogie along, with new ones opening all the time, and it’s great to visit the little ones, afire with passion, like Rollingdale and Pentage.

The food side hasn’t had quite the strong, fast legs of the wine business, but there’s always something new going on.

The highlight on this trip was Raudz Regional Table in Kelowna. It’s kind of a born-again restaurant. Even before the financial meltdown, Rod Butters and wife Audrey Surrao decided to redo their very successful Fresco restaurant. They’d always wanted to open a second, more casual place but decided, why not redo Fresco?

Raudz Regional Table was the result. (The name is an odd play on their first names.) Prices are lower and gone are the crisp linen, fresh flowers, amuse bouche and fine dining details (like reservations) — which, face it, you paid for. I liked it so much I wished I could stay longer for a second visit to try more dishes.

Mains can go as low as $12 for a souped-up hot dog (a riff on the couple’s experience of a Strasbourg hot dog with pommes frites piled atop the hot dog of two merguez sausages) or $14 for a locovore burger with beef from Enderby, cheese from Kelowna, and buns made with locally milled flour. The top end includes lamb tenderloin with lavender marinade, whipped potatoes, and minted vegetable salad and tenderloin/shortrib dish with horseradish mayo and fries for $25 and $29.

We tried a couple of appetizer specials — light, creamy asparagus soup with morels (a little skimpy on the morels), a bull’s eye hit on fresh asparagus flavour. Calamari with sun-dried olive stuffing and roasted cauliflower salad was delicious. For mains, we had pan-fried salmon with prawn and shrimp ravioli in a tomato broth and a tuna casserole. The latter was no canned tuna mum’s casserole — fresh tuna belly is smoked in applewood and the rotini-shaped pasta is smothered in a celeriac cream sauce. Neither were fussed-over but were cooked with expertise.

The signature dessert — a double chocolate mashed potato brioche with raspberry sorbet and warm chocolate sauce — was not especially impressive. Why add weight and density and moisture to ruin the glory that is brioche? That said, I wasn’t able to sample others which included a cherry chocolate truffle tart and pink rhubarb cheesecake with strawberry compote.

Butters, who’s been around the block, as chef at the Wickaninnish Inn and sous chef at Chateau Whistler and Four Seasons Hotel, says the menu is 80 to 85 per cent regional. The food, he says, is the kind of food we all like to eat often.

Sidelines: On our trip, we stayed at the 115-acre, eclectic God’s Mountain B & B in Penticton, run by Sarah Allen, former owner of Tuscany Pizza on Bowen Island. Joy Road Catering, run by a couple with with lots of kitchen cred from Toronto, runs dinner programs there on Wednesdays and Sundays from June to the end of October and the word is, they’re fab. If you don’t see them there, they sell artisanal baking at the Saturday morning Penticton Farmers’ Market.

I also tried Amanti Bistro (483 Main St.), a newish restaurant in Penticton. It’s well-priced and tries hard but Raudz left them in the dust. The Bench Artisan Food Market (368 Vancouver Avenue), however, is well worth stopping by for a lunch or gelato.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Chef Frank Pabst of the Blue Water Cafe in Vancouver, with a copy of his new cookbook and a plate of swimming scallops. Photograph by: Mark van Manen, Vancouver Sun

Vancouver has lured many a French chef with Michelin-starred experience to come and stay a while. Frank Pabst, chef of Blue Water Cafe, is one of them.

In an inter-continental co-incidence, he and two other chefs whom he worked with in a Michelin-starred restaurant in in Nice moved here, years after they’d lost touch.

“It’s hilarious,” says Pabst, of discovering Jean-Yves Benoit (chef/owner of Mistral) and Jean-Francis Quaglia (chef/owner of Provence Mediterranean Grill and Provence Marinaside) were also in Vancouver. “The world is so big.”

Pabst is chef at Blue Water Cafe, but has also worked as sous chef at Lumiere during the Rob Feenie era. It’s an auspicious year: Blue Water recently took the Best Seafood Award at the Vancouver Magazine restaurant awards and Pabst’s first cookbook, Blue Water Cafe Seafood (Douglas & McIntyre), was recently released.

The cookbook features more than 80 recipes from dishes served at the restaurant, including from the Blue Water sushi bar, run by chef Yoshihiro Tabo.

You see evidence of their influence on one another.

“He does his thing and I mine, but when he brings in ingredients I’ve never seen before, I figure out how to use them for myself. And it’s also interesting for him when we get things like wild or white asparagus,” says Pabst.

“It’s influenced me just a little bit, but I’m French-trained and lived in south France so that’s been a big influence.”

Pabst has simplified some dishes for the home cook — but not all. The Gazpacho and Zucchini Blossoms Stuffed with Dungeness Crab sounds summer-delicious, but it involves making the gazpacho, steaming zucchini flowers with a scallop/crab/zucchini stuffing as well as zucchini blossom tempura. Not for novices!

On the other hand, Pink Swimming Scallops with Tomato-Lemon Compote is a simple and excellent way to take advantage of local scallops in the shell. And anyone could handle Wild Spring Salmon with Braised Fennel, Vanilla and Green Olives or the Manila Clams, Steamed with Sake, Ginger and Ponzu.

The cookbook acquaints you with fish you’re not so friendly with but should be.

They’re part of Pabst’s “unsung hero” list of local seafood that’s sustainable and under-used — squid, octopus, herring, sardines, sea urchin and mackerel.

His job is to make them enticing and move our collective attitudes: Cured Herring Tartare with Granny Smith apple, Red Onions and Coriander is one such dish and Grilled Octopus with Carrot-Anchovy Salad and Parsley Sauce is another.

Restaurant dishes are about 90-per-cent Ocean Wise, he says, referring to a sustainable seafood program and guide and other ingredients are about 80-per-cent regional. “It’s challenging to stay sustainable and still be interesting.”

Well, the critics have spoken and, judging by the Best Seafood restaurant designation for the year, he’s met the challenge.

[email protected]

– – –

PINK SWIMMING SCALLOPS WITH TOMATO-LEMON COMPOTE

Pink swimming scallops are available right now at the False Creek Fisherman’s wharf and this is an easy way of making use of these local shellfish. From Blue Water Cafe Seafood Cookbook by Frank Pabst.

20 fresh pink swimming scallops

12 Roma tomatoes

1/4 cup olive oil

2 shallots, sliced

1 clove garlic, sliced

Zest of 1 lemon

1 tablespoon chopped capers

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Pinch of sugar

2 tablespoons dry bread crumbs

1 tablespoon thyme leaves

Shuck scallops, keeping bottom shells and discarding top shells.

Remove the beard and dirt sack from each scallop, but leave the scallop muscle and roe intact. Fill a pot with salted water, add scallops and allow to rinse for 5 minutes.

Fill a bowl with ice water. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil on high heat. Add tomatoes and blanch for 10 seconds, then plunge them into the ice bath. Peel and seed the tomatoes, then dice the flesh.

In a medium saute pan, heat olive oil on medium heat. Add shallots and garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes and lemon zest, then reduce the heat to low and cook until tomato water has evaporated, about 30 seconds. Remove from the heat, add capers, parsley and sugar, then season with salt and pepper.

Melt butter in a saute pan on medium heat. Add bread crumbs and cook for 1 minute, or until golden brown. Add thyme leaves and mix well to combine.

Turn the broiler on. Place the scallop shells on a baking sheet, then onto each scallop shell, spoon 1 teaspoon of the tomato-lemon compote. Top with a scallop, then sprinkle the scallops with the bread crumb mixture. Broil for 3 to 4 minutes, until bread crumbs are golden and the scallops are cooked.

To serve, divide the scallops evenly among 4 plates.

Makes 4 servings

WILD SPRING SALMON WITH BRAISED FENNEL, VANILLA AND GREEN OLIVES

There’s an unexpected ingredient in the braising liquid — vanilla. It heightens the fennel experience and adds a really neat side note to salmon. From Blue Water Seafood Cookbook by Frank Pabst.

Braised fennel:

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 bulbs fennel, trimmed and cut in 6 pieces each

4 cloves garlic, chopped

3 large shallots, chopped

2 sprigs fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

1 cup dry, crisp chardonnay

3 cups chicken stock

24 small, organic green olives, pitted

2 Roma tomatoes, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1/2 vanilla bean, seeds scraped but pod reserved

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

12 grape tomatoes, halved

Salmon:

4 fresh, wild spring salmon fillets, 5 ounces each, skin removed

2 tablespoons olive oil, for searing salmon

Drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, for garnish

Braised Fennel: Preheat the oven to 375 F. Heat olive oil in a large ovenproof sauté pan on medium heat. Add fennel, garlic, shallots, thyme and bay leaf and sauté for about 5 minutes until fragrant. Season with salt and pepper.

Deglaze the pan with wine and chicken stock. Bring the mixture to a boil and stir in olives and Roma tomatoes. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and braise in the oven for about 20 minutes until vegetables are just tender. Use a slotted spoon to transfer fennel and olives to a second oven-proof pan and set them aside.

Add fennel seeds and vanilla bean, both seeds and pod, to the remaining liquid and cook it on medium-high heat on stovetop until it has reduced by half, about 12 minutes.

Discard the vanilla pod. Purée the braising mixture in a blender, then pass the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean bowl. Season with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Reduce the oven temperature to 200 F.

Add parsley and grape tomatoes to the fennel and olives. Pour the sauce over the fennel mixture, toss well to combine and keep warm in the oven.

Salmon: Heat a sauté pan over high heat. Season fish with salt and pepper, then add olive oil to the pan. Reduce the heat to medium, add the salmon and sear for 2 minutes on each side.

To serve, place three pieces of fennel in each of four large, shallow bowls. Add a quarter of the sauce, then top with a fillet of salmon and finish with a drizzle of olive oil.

Makes 4 servings

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Owner Luis Montalvo is all smiles at El Barrio restaurant on East Hastings in Vancouver. Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

EL BARRIO RESTAURANTE LATINO

2270 East Hastings St., 604-569-2220.

www.elbarrio.ca

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

– – –

Translated, the name means “neighbourhood” and, from the looks of it, that’s what El Barrio Restaurante focuses on. Along with the Latin food, there’s salsa lessons and dancing, flamenco, open mike night, live music and local art for sale.

The food is a bit Mexican, Salvadorean and Cuban and a bit Montalvo, the last referring to the owner-chef Luis Montalvo who changes things a bit. “It’s my take on Latin food. It’s a little mixed up,” he says.

Montalvo has been in the restaurant industry since he came to Canada from El Salvador 23 years ago; his last job was as food and beverage director at the Hilton in Richmond.

When I visited, we were the only ones there. That’s when you thank god for music. The lively Latin music had the energy equivalence of at least eight people. We hardly noticed how lonely we were. Montalvo says the place tends to get busy around 8 p.m., whereas we wandered in around 7. Prices for starters range from $7.50 to $10; mains cost $14 to $16.

Things started off swimmingly. I was really pleased with the sopa Azteca made with a chicken and tomato broth and filled with vegetables. Tortilla strips jutted out of the soup bowl like wind-blown hair and circling the bowl were littler bowls of avocado pieces, queso duro (soft cheese) and chipotle paste to embellish the soup.

Tacos also pleased, with filling options of beef, chicken, house-made chorizo or fish of the day. The chorizos were a good choice.

If you’re dying for seafood, you might be out of luck, depending on the day’s reservations.

Montalvo likes to shop daily for the fish and if the evening looks like it’s going to be quiet, he’ll forgo the fish as the demand for seafood is low to begin with.

The day I called him, he’d bought Arctic char, enough for four servings.

But when I visited, the Catch of the Day was not available, I turned to chicken — pollo en mole — the mole reverberated with the flavour of Mexican chocolate and the chicken was tender and juicy. The rest of the dish matched the sides on my partner’s plate: sauteed peppers, rice and a smooth black bean puree.

“When I went to cooking school, it was the only Mexican recipe in the book,” he says of the pollo en mole. “I didn’t like it so I made it my own.”

He’d ordered what amounted to pulled beef (ropa vieja) which Montalvo borrowed from Cuba. Neither of us took to this dish. The pulled meat was too wet and the dish looked drab and unappealing.

Dessert suited us. The tres leche cake was made by poking holes into a tall vanilla cake and drizzling three milks — condensed, evaporated and whipped cream — into them. It’s light and not too sweet.

The beverage list didn’t feature any wines but he does carry some house wines if you ask. Hmm. Maybe best stick with a beer.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Shuraku provides a little more polish than the typical izakaya-style of many Japanese restaurants

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Chef Masahiro Omori of Shuraku Sake Bar and Bistro holds a tempting tray.

SHURAKU SAKE BAR AND BISTRO

833 Granville St., 604-687-6622.

www.shuraku.net.

Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

– – –

‘I feel like Survivorman,” my partner said. I rolled my eyes.

My brave he-man had just eaten a fried prawn head. We’d ordered some spot prawn nigiri at Shuraku Sake Bar and Bistro.

They arrived achingly fresh with the heads sitting neatly beside the nigiri. “We can fry them for you,” our server said. “Okay,” we trilled.

Upon their return, I lost my trill, nibbling only the tickle-me tentacles. My partner dug in, though. Not quite Survivorman-like, he took mouse-sized bites and stopped at the accusing little black eyeballs.

(For those out of the loop, Survivorman is a TV show where this guy is dumped in the wilderness and films himself surviving without food or shelter or tools for seven days in each episode.)

Be it the 25 premium sakes by the glass, the twinklingly fresh sushi, the stand-out tempura or the lure of fried spot prawn heads, you’re in for a unique dining experience at Shuraku.

You might think it’s an izakaya, the plot in many of the newer Japanese restaurants. Although Vancouver izakayas have migrated upward from the beer-plus-eats version in Japan, Shuraku is much too polished to count as one. It does offer small plates and sharing plates, but it also offers sushi and sashimi, not common in izakayas. Instead of beer, or wine, they really make a big deal of sake, a tribute to owner Iori Kataoka’s grandfather, who was a sake maker. (The “shu” in Shuraku means sake.)

Kataoka also owns Zest restaurant at Dunbar and 16th, a really polished Japanese restaurant which I recommend.

She bought out Kitto, which she operated in this same spot for 10 years. Shuraku is its transformation.

A prawn head or two, incidentally, is not adventurous dining for the Japanese.

“The Japanese would not miss it,” Kataoka says.

The chef, Masahiro Omori, worked in high-end hotels in Tokyo but also wanted to learn izakaya cooking so after his high-end shifts, he worked in an izakaya. Shuraku blends the two styles. Omori is the one with the black plastic hair band holding back his hair, girlie-style. “It’s supposed to be trendy,” Kataoka says, sounding like she needs more convincing.

The sushi we tried were top- notch; there are the classics as well as “Innovative Rolls” which I often find go over the top with sauces and extreme size.

His are more refined; however, one exception, called Pink Igloo (deep-fried salmon, scallions, radish, sushi rice wrapped in pink soybean paper and sitting on drizzles of cream cheese mayo) was bland in spite of all that was going on. I liked the Renkon Hasami Age (a lightly deep-fried sushi roll with shrimp and lotus root).

The back ribs glazed with Japanese barbecue sauce are positively yummy; the Ban Ban Gee is a tweaked Chinese-style chicken. Cold shredded chicken with sesame sauce is tamped into a puck so dense the server loosens it with a fork for you.

The eggplant poppers are cool considering most everything you do with eggplant is limp and wet. These crunch.

He inserts chicken and pork into an incision in a piece of eggplant, batters, then deep-fries it to a light crispiness.

Shuraku is easy to miss on Granville Street amid what looks like a psycho public works project. Wear sensible shoes because while Canada Line construction continues, you’ll be slip-sliding on gravel.

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It’s located in a spot that’s done in many restaurants, but none of them had Tiff

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Chef/Manager Topnarie (Tiffany) Kulsiriwanich at Charm Modern Thai with Panang Beef (left) and Green Curry Burger. – IAN LINDSAY / VANCOUVER SUN

CHARM MODERN THAI AND BAR

Overall: fffoo

Food: fffoo

Ambience: fffho

Service: fffho

Price: $$

1269 Hamilton St., 604-688-9339.

www.charmmodernthai.com.

Open daily for lunch and dinner.

Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.

– – –

If you wonder what’s charming about Charm Modern Thai Restaurant, from my perspective, it’s the chef-manager.

Saying her name might turn you blue in the face before you finish — Tipnarie Kulisiriwanich — which is why, as she says, “People call me Tiff.”

Even via phone, I can tell she’s a character, ablaze with a culinary mission. Her circum-journey from Thailand to Japan to Australia to the U.S. and now Canada is part of that.

Even before she was a chef, when she dined out, she’d end up in the kitchen, observing, or, better yet, telling the chef how to do it better. You get the drift .

Three years ago, after running and cooking in Thai restaurants on the strength of her own abilities, she went to the Northwest Culinary Academy in Vancouver and got even more fired up. “I was getting tired of classic Thai and so bored of the same old thing and I wanted to see what I could do.”

Charm Modern, run by a member of the Thai House restaurant family, took over a location that’s chewed up restaurants one by one, the last of which was Flite — and it did (take flight).

I’d say it’s a toss-up for Charm — there are some unique dishes, which Kulisiriwanich hesitates to call fusion because “it seems to have lost its way.”

She calls it modern.

“I like that word better,” she says.

Some of her Thai dishes are tweaked with international punctuations (beef shortribs marinated in Thai spices, duck confit spring rolls) and some are international dishes with Thai insertions (Thai-inflected burgers, tuna tartare, papparadelle and tempura).

Of the dishes I tried, I liked the papparadelle and Penang beef the most.

The latter, even though it was in a curry sauce, had a rich beef bourguignon feel to it.

Green papaya salad is always a nice refreshing dish.

Lemongrass mussels didn’t feature the plumpest of mussels but came in a tasty spiced-up wine broth.

Chicken satay was juicy and mild, not a standout.

Steamed basa (a white fish that seems to be the spawn of sole and cod) looked lovely, laden with veggies, rolled and balanced on end in a broth; the only detraction was the broth which went overboard with lime juice.

Tamarind duck with a sweet chili tamarind reduction needed a bigger hit of duck flavour to meet the tamarind glaze halfway.

The room is designed with a bold hand — black walls, massive gilt-framed mirrors, plush red booths, bamboo pole dividers and Buddha art; sort of Versailles meets bordello meets Zen; in the lounge, the addicted can stay close to the hockey playoffs.

Here’s a case where an open kitchen would be advantageous.

Kulisiriwanich, through the sheer force of personality, would add personality and character.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

There are few dishes you can cook that will not benefit from a splash of the grape, local chefs

Mia Stainsby
Sun

Cioppino’s Pino Posteraro prepares lobster linguine, which is one of Vancouver Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo’s favourite meals. Photograph by: Ian Smith, Vancouver

Does lobster linguine figure in the Canucks’ recent boot from the playoffs? It was goalie Roberto Luongo’s pre-home-game ritual meal; he would pick it up from Cioppino’s restaurant the day before home games.

As we know, hockey’s full of superstitious dos and don’ts and so it couldn’t have been good when the Canucks’ nemesis, the Chicago Blackhawks — the whole darn team — ate at Cioppino’s, some of them moving in on Luongo’s lobster linguine. Their goalie Nikolai Khabibulin went back three times to eat there.

“Roberto called me and said ‘What are you doing!'” says chef-owner Pino Posteraro, after one of the Canucks’ losing games.

Like most of Posteraro’s dishes, the lobster linguine is made all the more elixir-like with the magic of wine — in this case, the lobster is cooked in a court bouillon flavoured with wine and more wine in the pasta sauce.

“I use white wine for fish dishes. It cuts down the fat and it’s another layer of flavour,” says Posteraro, who can only catch glimpses of games while running the kitchen.

When it comes to cooking with wine, one common technique Posteraro avoids is marinating meats in wine to tenderize them because he thinks it does the opposite. “I just use a little more wine in the braising and cooking, reducing it to concentrate the flavour. You get the same results as marinating,” he says. “When you marinate, there is a loss of meat juices because of osmosis.”

And he never marinates game in wine because it intensifies the gaminess. “When I worked with a two-star Michelin chef, he told me never to marinate game; it gets a stronger flavour of game and gets drier.”

On the other hand, Jean-Francis Quaglia of Provence restaurants follows Provençal tradition, marinating his daube de boeuf in a wine-marinade overnight before cooking. “For me, marinating meat in red wine gives it such intense flavour,” he says. All his meat and poultry uses wine at some point in the cooking, he says.

Flavour-wise, from a scientist’s point of view, alcohol in wine reacts with acids in foods to form esters, which are fragrant and fruity. It can also react with oxidizing substances to form aldehydes, which are defining flavours in almond, cinnamon and vanilla.

But from a chef’s point of view, it simply adds an important dimension to the baseline. “It provides a foundation flavour,” says Warren Geraghty, chef at West. “It’s a very important flavour. It adds a rich, unctuous, fuller-bodied finish.”

But cooks should not attempt to show off their wine prowess by cooking with a $100 bottle of wine, he says. “Absolutely not. You’re reducing. You’re adding extreme heat. Can you imagine the fear on a sommelier’s face if you even stored wine on top of a radiator? You don’t boil a $100 bottle of wine.” Geraghty uttered that last comment just as West wine director Owen Knowlton walked by him. Knowlton winced as if shot through the heart.

The subtle notes of a fine wine won’t survive the blast of heat. “You’re wasting someone’s hard work if you spend too much on wine for cooking. It’s about respect for the guy making the wine, too,” says Geraghty.

When Knowlton chooses wines for cooking at home, his sommelier instinct kicks in and he uses the same strategy as pairing wines with food. That includes matching food and wine regions because wines are often created to go with foods of the region — like Argentinian Malbecs and grilled beef.

A bouillabaisse broth invites rose wines; lamb sauce invites Rioja; salmon calls for B.C. pinot gris; B.C. spot prawns call for something like Joie rose with the strawberry and raspberry notes; a sauce to go with steak calls for full-bodied cabernets like Australian shiraz or Spanish tempranillo.

If you should be so lucky as to be cooking lobster tail, the sauce ought have chardonnay, but unoaked.

“You don’t want smoky oaky,” Knowlton says.

However, oak might be a good idea with smoky B.C. sablefish.

Fruity wines, like German Rieslings go well with shellfish like scallops and Dungeness crab. But broths for mussels and clams might be more happy (as clams?) with simple, aromatic wines like Spanish Rueda wines. Zinfandels should team up with braised meats. “It’s full, rich, juicy and not tannic.”

But rare, grilled steaks demand tannic reds, like the Malbec.

“It’s trendy but has good value and good structure,” says Knowlton. “That being said, softer tannins cook better. If it’s too tannic, it’s going to give an intense dry, puckery sensation.” That’s another reason not to show off with expensive wines. The lower-priced wines work better for cooking as they’re not too tannic.

Once cooked in a dish, the distinctive taste of individual wines will be cooked off (as well as most of the alcohol.) What remains is the style of wine.

It’s important, however, to use fresh, lively wine. “It’s the acidity. If it’s been open for a week or two, you wouldn’t drink it and shouldn’t cook with it.” In other words, that half-bottle of white that’s sat unnoticed in the fridge? Forget about it!

The thing is, Knowlton says, there aren’t a lot of bad wines out there these days. Spending $10 to $20 for a wine to cook with is fine, he says.

“It’s amazing now. People have dialled into making great wines. Only a few are terrible. Inexpensive wines can be fantastic.”

As for the matter of luck and the lobster linguine, Posteraro says both he and Luongo are Italian, therefore superstitious, and maybe the Blackhawks took away some of the positive energy.

“In the end, Roberto’s such a great goalie and great person, I just feel lucky he comes here.”

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