flowbee

first time dov experience! was a great one. we went to salt. beverage of choice for the evening. i love stouts. this one's not bad. i like storm brewing's black plague stout (available at the whip) and the brooklyn black chocolate stout a bit more than this r&b one though. started off with a shaved fennel salad. not sure if it's available outside of dov, but it was a nice virgin fennel experience for me here's the pre-selected cheese platter they had on offer for dov. it was my first time pairing blue cheese with balsamic vinegar...it was actually a great match! my dessert. a different kind of blue cheese, with honey and pressed fig bread. i could do without the fig bread. it made the whole dessert way too sweet. but then, it's supposed to be a dessert i've been becoming a total cheese fanatic over the past couple years, and i would've been happy with another course of cheese for dessert. my wife had the dark chocolate mousse for dessert. raspberry jam on the bottom, bit of salt on top (geddit?). very decadent and rich. again, not sure if they serve this sort of thing outside of dov. i do love their location and whole concept. the waitstaff were awesome -- so happy and positive, great service, quick refills of bread. would love to come back and relax and eat some great meats and cheeses. truth be told, i have this type of meal almost every weekend -- baguette from swiss bakery, asst. meats & cheeses from oyama or les amis and beer from brewery creek. but it can be exhausting to hit all these places to set up one meal that i usually eat on the couch or in front of the computer. salt is great for the lazy side of me.

nice choice of dishes, panda. i like getting those (at other hk-style cafes). i haven't been to honolulu on kingsway in ages...is that the one that's in the same strip mall complex as london drugs? i've always thought that the cambodian/vietnamese restaurant across from honolulu cafe was the danger zone. it's open 24 hours, and looks like they never clean the floor. yuck. it's ironic that you find the cockroach in the somewhat cleaner-looking restaurant across from it.

my favourite line from the episode: "so i'll take you guys next door and show you how you can dupe a white person" i'll let you guys guess who said that...to be fair, they did say it as a joke. but there's a bit of truth in it methinks.

Is it Posh? I know the Richmond place was planning to expand. ← it is Posh! new location also mentioned on the Posh website.

i heard there's a new all-you-can-eat sukiyaki restaurant that just opened today on broadway (@ burrard) where golden szechuan restaurant used to be. $10 for lunch, $16 for dinner (from my foggy memory). and apparently they serve alberta beef...and they're canada's (north america's?) first specialty sukiyaki restaurant. it's within spitting distance from my work, so i'll just have to try it very soon!

my grandmother makes fried chicken with ginger. very tasty recipe i just might try this place if i'm ever in richmond... still diggin the korean-style fried chicken drenched in spicy sweet sauce from h-mart though!

Zocalo sounds interesting. Can you describe the dishes that you had? and welcome to the board!

i just drooled on myself from reading your description. thank you!

i think zaru soba is such a simple dish that you can make it yourself at home and end up with something at least on par with the best that the restaurants around here can muster. quite a few times i've had zaru soba that was disgusting...preboiled, left to sit out so the noodles turn into sticky mushy garbage. it's gotta be boiled-to-order. seriously, make it at home and jack it up with your own toppings like seaweed flakes etc. yum! i went to this handmade soba place in downtown calgary once, and it was very very disappointing. i think the owner adjusted his soba recipe to suit a non-asian clientelle and it just tasted wrong to me. i'm not sure if it's "traditional", but i like my soba to have a bit of firmness to it. the soba i ate had no springiness at all. on a side note, i hear that there's a handmade udon place in victoria. but i find frozen udon in the stores to be pretty damn good anyways. and i find nothing wrong with the dry buckwheat soba noodles you can get at fujiya or izumiya.

sweet! thanks for the update on their new location!

I totally agree that Abdul's BBQ has the best shawarma and falafel. His hot sauce is the best and he won't share the recipe! He's got takeout menus printed up now. Makes a nice read. I also like the lentil soup, which I'm sure he makes from scratch as well.

seems like el caracol (the mexi-salvadorean place on the same block as chilo's) has taken over chilo's. i drove by a couple times and noticed different signage. no idea if chilo is still running the place or not... (we're talking about victoria drive location) dona cata is still going strong though

that might be Charlie's Cafe?

just tried it today cuz we were in the area... pics below. the restaurant. kinda small, narrow. potstickers (aka "pan-fried dumplings"). although the frying technique was good, these must be the worst potstickers i've ever eaten. my main complaint is with the dough. no firmness or chewiness...it was almost mushy. the filling was ok...ground pork and veg, but the crappy wrapping brought it way down. their stir-fried "peaceful house noodles". on the menu it said it had seafood, meat and veg, and was "slightly spicy". well, it arrived without any seafood nor any spiciness. and we found it to be a lot oilier than i think was needed. don't you love the way the oiliness coats your lips as you eat? i don't. it was a little salty, yet with no flavour. the texture of the noodles was good...but i like sha-lin noodles' stir-fried noodles better. towards the end of our meal, we mentioned to the young waiter guy that the dish was missing the seafood, so he talked to the older lady waitress, then went to the kitchen to yell at the cook, but never came back to us so i don't know if the issue got resolved or what...if future dishes will be cooked with seafood or not... seems to be a weird communication problem between the floor and the kitchen. this was the lamb stew dish off the "something out of the ordinary" section of the menu. it's bits of lamb in a soup with clear vermicelli noodles, a bit of choy and house-made flatbread that's been cubed and plopped on top. the bread gets soggy and you eat it. i found it a little strange...a little bit like, uhhh, poor peasant food? i know i sound mean... but as i was eating, i kept thinking this was a dish that my dad would make, and he can't cook -- so he resorts to throwing a bunch of stuff in broth and adding noodles. (the dark stuff in the pic is wood ear fungus) i really feel for the people running this place though...i can imagine how hard it is to run a restaurant, only to have yahoos like me come in and trash the place. but if you're going to open up a few doors down from the king of hand-pulled noodles (Sha-Lin Noodle House) you gotta bring your a-game. what we had was below average. i didn't see or taste any pride in the dishes. on a positive note, we had no issues with the waitstaff. and the menu contains no engrish (aside from "blade-sheared noodles"). but on the whole, i found the flavours to be bland, they're really stingy with the meat and the prices are a little high for what you're actually getting. are the cooks actually tasting what they're cooking?? it seems like they're just going through the motions. they have a website with pics and their full menu: www.peacefulrestaurant.com maybe i'll go back to try the cat's ear noodle thing (cuz every place has their good and bad dishes), but honestly i'm in no hurry. sorry vancouver, this is no slight against you, this was just my experience. if any of you are curious about this place, you should go try it yourself and come to your own conclusions.

wow, aren't they on whyte ave in e-town? i had a catfish poboy there years ago! i remember i enjoyed it. i gotta try this new location!

just got back from a few days in Toronto. went to this awesome bar/cafe called Volo, where they had about ten or so specialty local craft beers/micro brews on tap. great cheese to go with the beers too. the list of beers on tap changes every so often. are there any similar places in Vancouver? (i don't like any of the Granville Island Brewery beers, and i thought Steamworks was meh...too loud, crowded, touristy)

hey, Andrew Morrison reviews Dona Cata

We just ate at Dona Cata, and saw a few of their press clippings on the wall. They won VanMag's "Best of the Americas" category, which was a pleasant surprise. They deserve it. They have lamb tacos now too. Yum. Other than Mouse and the Bean, I've never heard of the other restaurants in that category...anybody been?

another example of seeing something everywhere until you actually need it--then you can't find it anywhere! i'm looking for beef/ox tongue (whole). any leads?? i saw some frozen ones at T&T, but i was looking for fresh. plus the frozen ones seemed a little expensive for what people might consider to be a "reject" cut (over $20 for one tongue...$5.99/lb). i'm planning on simmering it in soy sauce, slicing then finishing off on a grill for extra pizzazz, and eating with a hot bowl of rice with barley mixed in.

actually, it's "Hi Dozo"...

i need to find a black forest cake! any recs?

there's one carribean place that's good, near the gateway skytrain station. it's called "taste nice". just too far for me

the beef bowl restaurant was this one: http://zensho.com/ i think they have their menu online. it was our very first meal when we got into shinjuku. my wife had that bowl, she says it was just sauce. my guess is mostly sauce and onions.

follow-up to my post above, here's some pics of the different kinds of inexpensive food we enjoyed in shinjuku. i hope no one minds the mega-photo post: a hamburger curry bowl. easy dish to find anywhere, quite filling and delicious. beef bowl (gyudon), from the same place as above. extremely popular dish. our hairdresser from tokyo says it's his favourite dish. tonkotsu ramen. if you look at the fan that they gave us, you can sort of see a pig statue, which is this chain's mascot i guess. several locations around tokyo, this chain specializes in tonkotsu-style ramen. the noodles are thinner than the more typical style ramen. the soup is milky because (i believe) it's made from pressure-cooking pork bones in broth. this location was a couple blocks away from the nishi-shinjuku hotel. this is the dry ramen i mentioned in my previous post...almost like "zaru-style". i'm a big noodle person, so i loved this new (for me) presentation. the more conventional shoyu ramen. from same place as the dry ramen, just 2-3 blocks from our hotel. the infamous rice burger from mos burger. it was actually pretty good, although i'll stick with regular buns. my favourite burger, also from mos burger. the condiments made up for the lack of "meatiness" in japanese burgers. burger from freshness burger. imho not as good as mos burger. but both freshness and mos burger were very close to our hotel, so we actually compared burgers from both places in the same night. "dry" udon from a place called metsu-dan, 1.5 blocks away from our hotel. amazing stuff. top one is scrambled eggs on udon, bottom one is udon with caviar. the side dishes are all set up buffet-style, where you get a tray and just pick whatever you want and the cashier tallies it up accordingly. the natto udon was a must-try for me. interesting combination. i loved it. here's their sign, if anyone wants to check them out. by far the spiciest thing i ate on my entire asia trip (which included korea and singapore). this place is a chain restaurant called little spoon. you can order curries and customize the level of spiciness, which is illustrated on the menu with cute cartoons, ranging from a baby (not spicy) to a dragon (maximum spicy). i've eaten a lot of japanese curry at home using the glico/java/etc brands of curry roux blocks, and i always buy "hot" (which is actually "mild" to most people), so i thought "this is japan, how hot can 'dragon fire hot' be?" well, it was sooo painfully hot i spent half the time in the restaurant in the bathroom blowing my nose and gasping for air. like a fool i asked them to "bring it on", and they definitely "brought it" with a kick in the ass to boot. not high cuisine, i know, but it was all extremely enjoyable for me. vancouver has some pretty good japanese food, but with the quality and variety that's available in japan, it just doesn't compare. imho even japan's "fast food" is miles beyond ours...

we stayed 10 days in nishi-shinjuku last September. we loved it! i love that area. we stayed at Hotel Nishi-Shinjuku, which is really close to the train station. it's just on the west side of the main street that runs north-south from the station, so it's great cuz you're really close to the action in east shinjuku, but the hotel is in a nice quiet area just west of there. anyways, we enjoyed a lot of the ramen places around there, and also this one udon place that makes fresh udon and serves it in a unique "dry" (without soup) style, which i've never seen before in Vancouver. there's a ramen place a couple blocks away that also serves ramen "dry". i think the udon place was featured in a movie called "Udon" because they had the poster for the movie up...and i also saw this place featured in an "Udon" promotional magazine/book (there were many other places featured as well, so this place may not be *that* special all considered, but we loved it). sorry if i'm being vague, i'll have to dig up photos and directions some time.... oh, you have to try some of the yakitori places in piss alley before they tear it down just have to add that we loved even the cheapo vending machine curry places, where you buy a meal ticket from a vending machine then bring it inside to receive your food and eat it. cheap, satisfying and very japanese!