Tag Archives: Parkside

Sardine Can

I know I talk about the Andrey Durbach/Chris Stewart restaurants a fair bit. It’s because I love eating at them, and have done for some years now. I have celebrated more birthdays at Parkside and Cafeteria than anywhere else, the MD and I ate our wedding dinner at Parkside, and according to my Foursquare whatsit, we’ve been to Cafeteria 19 times since it opened, nearly two years ago now. Pied-à-Terre and La Buca are also favourites, although simple geography tends to keep us on the East Side.

So they’re expanding again, into a tiny little hole in the wall at 26 Powell Street in Gastown, to be called the Sardine Can.

They posted a taste of menus to come earlier this morning.

Menu in theory……..

gambas pil pil — spicy garlic prawns $10
lomo embuchado — dry cured pork loin ham $10
guisado de pulpo — octopus, chorizo and potato casserole $10
albondigas — meatballs in tomato and Rioja wine $10
pa amb tomaquet y manchego — tomato, manchego & olive oil toast $5
arroz la bomba — Spanish rice with paella bits $10
queso cabrales — blue cheese and carrot jam toasts $5
chorizo y jerez — full flavored sausage cooked in sherry $10
piquillos rellenos — imported piquillos filled with salt cod $10
empanadas — beef cheek and potato pastries $10 (for 3)
bocados — mixed olives, spiced almonds, chickpea spread $5
diablos espanoles — warm dates stuffed with bacon and Mahon $5
pan — terra breads sourdough $2

terrine de chocolate — chocolate terrine with sea salt and olive oil $5
flan de dulce de leche — baked caramel flan $5

I think it’s fair to say that I will be a customer reasonably soon after they open, later this month.

Still alive; still eating :D

So the other night, I was riding Enzo down Main Street, after an unsuccessful hunt for espe handbags. Thought to myself, “Self, wasn’t the new Andrey Durbach/Chris Stewart restaurant supposed to open one of these days?”

Well, my self was correct, and being as there was an empty parking slot right out front of Cafeteria, I hopped off and popped in to say hello to some of my favourite people in the world. I had a chat, took a look around, saw that there was a spot prawn and salmon sashimi dish and Dungeness crab tortelloni on the menu, and called my Main Distractor to say “Let’s EAT!”

I did stop back home to change out of my scooter togs, but we were back, salivating, in an hour.

It’s called Cafeteria, and there are no tablecloths and no printed menus. The menu is instead on a felt board, easily adjusted to suit the whims of the chef, the market and the season. The “starter” small plates (including soup of the day, a Caesar salad, an asparagus and chorizo dish, and mushrooms á la façon du chef) are largely under $10 (the sashimi dish being a worthwhile exception—the Main Distractor just INHALED that baby), and the “mains” are under $20. Options included chicken schnitzel with spaetzle, pot-au-feu, the Dungeness crab tortelloni which just blew us away, red snapper and a duck breast “steak et frites” that looked like it came with polenta fries.

Wines come in at three price levels: $30, $40 and $50, with some available by the glass, and there is also a specials board for wine, ranging from $35 to $70 a bottle when we were there. There is also beer on tap (Red Racer) and Big Rock cider by the bottle (that’s a good BC alternative to Strongbow, by the way; nice and dry).

The space is clean and bright, with enough room between tables for my large posterior to easily enter and exit the banquette (ahem).

I did enjoy eating at Ping’s, but there’s no comparison. The menu is straightforward, concise, and oh, so Durbach. Not kawaii like Ping’s, but I have a limited tolerance for kawaii in relation to food in any event. Conversely, I appear to have an unlimited appetite for restaurants operated by Chris and Andrey. We’ve missed Parkside dreadfully this past year and l’Altro Buca as well.

Cafeteria is on Main at 11th Avenue; they don’t take reservations. They’ll be serving dinner daily from 5:00 pm. You may very well find me and the MD chowing down :D OH and I will probably have an espe handbag, since I ordered a couple online this morning and they’ve already shipped :D

This reads like promo material, doesn’t it?! but I just love it so, I can’t help it.

Shocking.

I think I haven’t had a proper, you know, blog post, for more than a month.

And what a momentous month it’s been, too!

The MD and I had our actual one-year anniversary, versus all the monthaversaries we’d celebrated heretofore. It was swell. We checked Choobie in to the daycare for the weekend, and went to the Planetarium, and stayed at a little B&B in the West End so we could do stuff in the city and wander home after on foot or a cheap cab. We went to dinner at the place we first had dinner together, and then we went to see a friend’s band, which was fun.

Next morning we got up for breakfast, which I can’t remember at all what it was. We went to the Art Gallery and saw lots of Art. We went to the movies and saw Duplicity, which wasn’t really very good. We went back to the room and relaxed for a bit and then got dressed and went to The Sylvia to watch the sunset from the bar and have a delicious cocktail. Then we went to l’Altro Buca, which is the replacement restaurant for Parkside’s location, and that was extremely good, of course. Then we stumbled home…no, we took a cab, my shoes of extreme cuteness were not suitable for drunken stumbling.

Next day was gorgeous and sunny and we went to Science World on the way back to the homestead. it was a v nice weekend, we both enjoyed it :)

Since then, the MD’s Stuff has arrived. There has been a lot of moving of stuff, throwing out of stuff, taking stuff to the storage, and related stuff.

This past weekend (13 monthaversary!) we went to Seattle, to see the long-awaited My Bloody Valentine show (YES! it was AWES!). We also got to have dinner with Peter and Cecilie and their friend Richard, and it was lots of fun. We may be heading south again to see Metric next month, depends on a couple of things.

So aside from absorbing stuff and stuff like that, the MD’s parents are coming to town for a visit in just over a week. Concurrently, my parents will be down for a weekend (OH NOES! PARENTAL SUMMIT!) We have restaurant reservations already although we haven’t decided everything that will be going on. They’ll be staying with us so there is some amount of cleaning/arranging of stuff. this weekend we’re organizing the laundry room. Which excites me more than I would have thought it would.

Some we buy, some we make.

Working backwards…Parkside last Friday. 6-course chef’s tasting menu.

Celeriac and cauliflower soup, porcini foam? truffle oil? lush, served with an Italian Bidoli Sauvignon Blanc
The scallop dish with grapefruit, guanciale, fennel, watercress and whatnot, a beautiful Parkside vinaigrette, served with a Hendry rosé
The shortrib ravioli, with a La Quercia Montepulciano
The deer, the lovely lovely deer and red wine reduction, Australian Vasse Felix Cabernet Sauvignon
The steak fiorentina with the most incredible onion ring in HISTORY!, with a Moulin de Gassac Guilhem
The famous lemon tart, which I likely would not have ordered on my own, but which was delicious of course, so glad I got to try it. With mascarpone cream I think? and blood orange sorbet. Served with an Asti Moscato, and then Mr. Stewart gave us a taste of his Tokaji, which was quite quite lush.

Farewell, dear friend. Hope to meet you again one day.

I made a very successful orecchiette with ricotta and basil and tomatoes.

For Valentine’s Day, we stayed in and had a seafood feast. The standout dish was the tarragon crab salad, made with Dungeness claw meat (!!! so spendy! but SO GOOD), followed by the shrimp cakes with lime chili cream sauce. The teeny heart-shaped cheesecakes were not photogenic and hence are not pictured, but were very tasty.

Strange

that it is taking a sick day to have some time to blog…not heinously sick, but major headache and backache combine to create a largely immobile Deeb. Perhaps I will feel better later if I have a nap, I hope.

So what’s been up…I joined twitter (@bittersweetdb) and I suppose the so-called microblogging is taking a bit away from the actual blogging. But the feed shows up over here on the right so if you’ve any interest you can just look over there from time to time. Radiohead friends and food geek friends and Philly friends and people I’ve never met can be fun to “follow.” The whole “liveblogging” thing that people do with that damn stupid scrolly window is impossible for me so never mind that but the tweeting is OK. You also find people and media outlets which are just as pompous and tedious on twitter as they are IRL or their primary web presence, or whose web presence doesn’t translate well to twitter…so some people/sites that I have on RSS feed I don’t duplicate on twitter as it’s just a whack of clutter.

But there are surprising people! or at least for me, since I am (voluntarily) shut off from so much media. Stephen Fry is a very amusing person to follow; ?uestlove is a champion tweeter, also entertaining and informative. Cory Doctorow can get on my tits for sheer volume sometimes, and I’m not sure if I’ll keep him or just satisfy myself with my boingboing RSS. I recently found @LaBuca is on twitter! La Buca being the sister restaurant to my dearly departed, lamented and fondly remembered Parkside, which I find I didn’t have a Parkside tag in here, and I ought to have.

Parkside was my favourite Vancouver restaurant for the past 4 years or something, hard for me to pinpoint. But I’ve had some of my best meals ever there, made a convert of the Main Distractor, celebrated more stuff there than anywhere else ever, I think, beating out even La Grolla in Philly. The MD and I went there for one last meal last weekend, had a tasting menu that pleased us in every way, and have resigned ourselves to the undoubted excellence that the next incarnation of the space as another La Buca will offer. We’re booked for our one-year anniversary weekend and I will report. It is a continuation of the Andrey Durbach/Chris Stewart partnership that has spelled restaurant gold in this city for some years now. There are flashier places (God knows) and more self-aggrandizing owners (oh man!) than these two, but for diners who are more interested in the food than the buzz; in excellence of ingredients and execution; in a disciplined and devoted back-of-house and a warm and sincere front-of-house, I haven’t found anyone else who consistently delivers at this level. And even I can afford to eat in their restaurants (there’s also Pied-à-Terre, French bistro style), at least sometimes if not as often as I’d like.

So twitter has brought another intersection of worlds; in a good way I guess!

I think I will post more later, about some of the cooking and eating I have been doing.