doublemagnumCoal HarbourSince September 15, 20098 Reviews
(2.8)- Food
(3.1) - Service
(2.6) - Value (3.1)
- Ambiance (2.5)
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(2.8) (3.1) (2.6) (3.1) (2.5)Two of us had the Groupon 4 course tasting menu which (for $20 as a Groupon 1/2 price deal) was good value.
Service was attentive and smart without being snobbish.
And the food was sublime, though goodness knows how many thousands of these identical Groupon meals the kitchen must have churned out of late. Enough boredom in that routine to tax the enthusiasm of even the most committed of chefs! But there was no hint of fatigue in any of the dishes we sampled.
What was noticeably lacking, and in many cases really SAD for such a renowned restaurant in such a stellar setting, was the decrepit condition of the premises. From the rusting exterior awnings supports and chipped terracotta tile steps to the white tile dining room floor that was in need of a good mechanical cleaning and polishing, the whole place reeked of deferred maintenance and neglected attention to details.
The wooden bar top is stained and needs to be sanded down and refinished. Martini glasses behind the bar rested on a very dirty and stained looking towel. The bizarre cladding on the supporting dining room pillars ( looks like a school project made of cardboard scissor cutouts) had been damaged or caved in at the base and no attempt made to repair it. The space between the exterior window and the kitchen prep area was a hideous mess of old food and grease, all clearly and nauseatingly visible to departing diners.
I have seen this happen to too many restaurants. A steady increase in shabbiness resulting from complacency. Reputations need not only to be built but maintained, and the physical space is as important to the dining experience as what the kitchen is turning out.
C needs a facelift. Get a good interior designer in there (and a good cleaning company too) and spruce the place up a bit.
There was a time years ago when the various Vina locations around town were breaking ground by introducing Vancouverites to the then fairly novel idea of Vietnamese cuisine - and if memory serves they did it rather well too.
Fast forward to 2010 and although Vietnamese is not as well represented in the West End as other Asian foods, Vina is no longer alone in its genre.
Which then begs the question how their Denman Street location can keep slogging along year after tired year, unchanged, unimproved and unimpressive in every detail. Why hasn't competition put them out of their - and our- misery by now?
I stopped by for lunch recently; probably my first visit in a year or more. One thing hadn't changed - we were greeted by exactly the same overly loud Muzak-style piano music (the sort you'd hear being played in a hotel lobby or a mall by one of those grand pianos that don't need a human being sitting at them). Utterly inappropriate for such a restaurant.
The next thing we both noticed was the smell - not the smell of yummy food, but the smell of a carpet that hasn't been cleaned or replaced in a long time. Very revolting. The baseboards, chair rail adjacent to the tables, front entrance and washrooms are all filthy and in need of a good cleaning and a coat of paint. Why is this situation so prevalent among restaurants? See my recent review of Tanpopo - same filthy conditions, and I am no neat freak.
OK the lunchtime combo food is passable. Price consistent with what you get. But nothing to excite the senses or make you yearn for a return visit.
This place has a GREAT corner location! How does it keep limping along, usually 90% empty? Let someone else have a crack at this location and create a venue that has us lined up out the door and begging to return to. While we wait for that, I'm not going back to Vina....
This is a follow-up to a review I submitted on Sept 15/09. At that time I complained that Tanpopo was looking very shabby, was in need of a makeover or at least a good cleaning and a coat of paint, and the food was well below the already modest standards of most AYCE sushi joints.
The other day because my party of 4 was in a hurry and because our first choice of Akira on Denman was full, we opted for Tanpopo for lunch, and despite flashbacks to my last experience I silently went along with the choice.
Bad idea.
This place is filthy. There is no other way to describe it. The floors are dirty as are the baseboards. There are dead bugs all over the window sills (the windows are dirty too). The front entrance looks like you are entering a rundown flophouse. I didn't check out the restrooms - I'd want to update my tetanus immunity before trying that.
The service is slow, chaotic and indifferent. We ordered off the regular menu - a few very basic items. They came at haphazard intervals so that the four of us basically began and finished our meals alone. I had exactly the same dish as one of my friends, with the sole exception that mine came with "tempura prawns" and his did not. Otherwise identical. His arrived 20 minutes before mine and I finally had to ask 3 servers where my meal was. It finally arrived. A mixture of 2 prawns and the rest vegetable tempura - not as described. And the excuse was that "the tempura takes a long time".
Hello? They are slinging tempura out of the kitchen of an AYCE place on a non-stop basis.
There is simply no point wasting your time, money (and possibly your health until they clean it up) going to Tanpopo. This place needs new owners, a staff training course and about $100,000 of TLC to get it up to square one.
This place is locationally challenged, being at the corner of Denman and Georgia. Conventional wisdom says you don't want to site a resturant in the corner of a city where there is little walk-by traffic, and even less parking. They claim to have parking in back, but realistically this is a venue for those on foot. And being upstairs (despite the terrific 40+ seat patio) makes it all the harder to stumble upon. It's predecessor Yoshi limped along for several years then disappeared right after the Olympics. I was never a big fan of Yoshi for a number of reasons, and was worried that the former owners had done a "bait and switch" by simply changing the name.
The new format however is an AYCE, competing with Tanpopo (see my dinehere.ca review of it) and Kisha Poppo further up Davie, but in my opinion following a first visit, Taiko easily outshines them both.
Right now they are running a "Grand Opening" 20% off deal which reduces the already competitive $23.95 adult dinner AYCE tariff down to quite an affordable level.
The staff are attentive and smiling, the front of house sushi chefs (3 of them on our visit) are welcoming and enthusiastic as one would hope, and the food variety and quality was really surprisingly and refreshingly good.
Sashimi includes the usual salmon and tuna, but also singles out sockeye as an alternative to the farmed variety, and it is fresh, deep deep red and sweet. Other sashimi choices include things you don't often see on AYCE menues such as tako and hokkigai and several others. It would not be hard to imagine having an all-sashimi meal here and not being at all bored.
And the presentation is first rate. Artfully arranged on attractive glazed earthenware dishes with all the garnishes and attention to detail you would expect if paying full shot for a sashimi main dish elsewhere. Many AYCE places just slap 6or 8 pieces of sashimi on a plastic tray.
There is the usual assortment of nigiri sushi, udon and yakisoba dishes and a couple of desserts, plus a very nice assortment of robata and deep fried items, again some of which you do not see on typical AYCE menus, such as scallops.
My litmus test for a decent AYCE menu is the tempura prawns. I criticized Tanpopo's (further down Denman) as being limp, oily and soggy. Taiko's were textbook good, with delicate crunchy battering over fat juicy prawns (not shrimp masquerading as prawns).
Partly because Taiko is close to where I live, but also because I was very pleasantly surprised by the value and quality of the place, I will certainly be going back soon, and will tell my sushi-loving friends about it too.
(Oh yes, they also have a cool private tatami room that seats 12 and would be a great venue for a birthday party of similar small gathering.)
This is a duplicate posting to the one I left for "Toyo Tomi" (2 words) - apparently the same place is being reviewed under 2 different names, so here goes again:
Lunched at Toyo Tomi on the advice of a friend who works in the neighbourhood. All we wanted was a bento box, but the lunch hour crowd had packed the visible seats in the front of the restaurant. There was a table right by the door that was empty, but to their credit they advised us that the cold air from the front door opening and closing would make that table unpleasant. So we waited and waited, expecting that the staff was expecting one of the tables would leave as 1 pm was approaching. Instead we were finally told that a table was being set for us "in the back". Led down a long hall past the kitchen in the general direction of the bathrooms, to find ourselves in a dimly lit windowless cavern with a couple of tables (less than half of them occupied, so why the long wait at the front desk??). This was a depressing, charmless room devoid of music or any redeeming quality at all. The overhead lights were some sort of industrial vapour lamps that gave off a weak but sickly blue light - the kind that make even healthy people with tans look cadaverous. Why they have the front seating area squished into about 1/4 of the total floor space of the restaurant is quite beyond me. Whatever the reason, the experience of eating what turned out to be an otherwise tasty and fairly priced bento box in a room that only an undertaker could enjoy was just too much. I'd go back for the food and location, but I won't sit anywhere but up front. Nor should you.
Amid all the preening and faux-chic of Robson Street, its nice to find a place to eat that serves up straightforward, reliable and tasty bistro fare in an environment that makes you feel cozy and warm.
Nope, Hermitage is not Vancouver's best French restaurant. It is certainly not Robson's trendiest eatery. But it is welcoming and unstuffy - the food is all about "comfort and joy".
If the room is "dated" as some reviewers have complained, then I'd say it is just true to its genre. The best meals I have had in Paris have been in places that haven't seen a coat of paint much less a makeover in 40 years. I find the room warm and sheltering. It's a place that you could happily waste a rainy afternoon if you had the luxury of that much spare time.
The wine list could be a bit more extensive, and less ostentatious. It's a silly vanity to list 2 vintages of Ch. Petrus at $2600+ a bottle... c'mon, who are you really kidding with that. Add another 8 or 10 decent, accessibly priced wines and the choices will come closer to matching the menu.
When you can recite a restaurant's menu like a rosary, and never tire of some of the signature items, then its fair to describe yourself as a "regular". Guilty as charged!
I am lucky to live a 5 minute stroll from Tapastree, and from the first visit 6 years ago, I have never been disappointed. Yes its a bit noisy, but that is the sound of happy diners laughing and enjoying each others' company. Don't come here to break off an engagement and be melancholy! The single annoyance of the old smoking section on the patio, and the blast of smoky air that occurred every time a server opened the sliding door is thankfully a thing of the past, and now Tapastree is perfect for me.
OK, "perfect" is so subjective, and you can see I have not given 5 stars across the board. I don't want Francis and his friendly crew to become too complacent. There are better restaurants in Vancouver, but none to which I enjoy returning quite as much as this one.
There are always tasty new wines on the menu, and I have discovered some of my now favourite cellared wines after trying one of their by-the-glass selections.
If I had one suggestion, that would be to expand the daily features a bit. The printed menu changes infrequently, but the nature of tapas style eating ought to lend itself to more experimentation. Try adding some new specials to the blackboard - many of these "specials" never seem to change! See if the new offerings are a hit and then add them to the menu.
I can't see myself becoming jaded or bored with Tapastree, but why not mix things up a bit more? I'm dangling that elusive 5th star.... go for it.
I love small intimate restaurants with a buzz, and la Quercia delivers on this score. You have to admire the inventive use of space in the many long narrow storefront properties that are so typical of Vancouver neighbourhoods. Size dictates seating (tight, but not off-putting), bathroom locations (a single washroom in behind the kitchen etc.) and so on.
The menu is confined to a single sided sheet the size of a half piece of paper. It does not try to be all things to all people, instead focusing on seasonal and tasty dishes of the moment.
My companion and I had different tastes in wines and so opted for the selections by the glass, but these were quite adequate and fairly priced. The wine list itself reminded me yet again why I should spend more time learning about Italian wines. There are few clues to varietals or wine characteristics unless you already know the regions and sub-regions and what each is noted for. Had we been after a bottle I'm sure the staff would have been able to select the perfect wine.
My only complaint about la Quercia is one that I (and many other reviewers) share and that is the practice of rattling off the many daily specials verbally. Not only is the sheer volume of information you receive daunting and confusing - especially when the cuisine is unfamiliar - but our server was a woman with a fairly soft voice and a very strong Italian accent struggling to be understood over the background chatter. Combine all three of these elements, and I fear that many of the goodies on the "fresh sheet" are bypassed simply because no one can understand what they are!
Yes, there is a single blackboard listing the daily specials hanging over the kitchen, but we were seated tight against a bulkhead wall and were unaware of the blackboard until half way through our meal.
Either print a fresh sheet daily, rattle off the choices as now, but refer to the blackboard, and perhaps add a second blackboard. The specials are simply too good to risk missing out on otherwise.
I did manage to concentrate hard enough on the specials to select both a starter and a main from among them, while my companion ordered from the printed menu. All of the food was outstanding, inventive, reasonably priced and oh so tasty. I will go back for sure and update this review, but I will know enough now to listen r e a l l y closely to the specials, and seek out the blackboard!
