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Chow Times Updates

Hi All:

There is a few things I wanted to let you all know.  So, I guess the best way is to do this is to broadcast this on a blog post.

Chow Times Readers Dinner

I am trying to finalize the dinner details the next couple of day.  There are a few person who had indicated that they would like to attend but for some reason I am unable to get a response when I sent out the dinner details twice.  I think my emails might have landed on their spam folder.

The responses we had is good.  There are a few more places that I want to fill so that we can absolutely take over a private room for the dinner.  The dinner will be fun and a one-of-a-kind experience in a very relaxed and informal setting.  The cuisine will be exotic.  If you want to join us, just send me an email at ben@chowtimes.com and I will forward you the details.  The dinner will be from 5PM-8PM on Saturday, 20-June-2009.

Free Dessert from Ebisu

There were some confusion and flip-flopping over the Chowtimes-Ebisu exclusive Free Dessert promotion.  Sorry about that.  I want to confirm and let everyone know that you will get a Free Dessert for Every $30 Spent.  We had a few feedback on email telling Suanne and I that they enjoyed this.  If you had never been to Ebisu before, you should check them out.  Please check the details of the Free Dessert promotion on http://chowtimes.com/ebisu.

Keeping Track of Comments on Chow Times

We had just installed a new feature on the commenting system on Chow Times.  You can now keep track of responses via email to the comments you made on Chow Times.

If you want to be notified of followup comments through email, you just need to mark on the checkbox below the <Submit Comment> button.  Remember to leave a valid email address before you hit submit.

For those of you who are technically savy, you can also subscribe to the comments feed of Chow Times.  With this you will have EVERY comments delivered to your feed reader.  The Chowtimes comments feed URL is http://chowtimes.com/wp-commentsrss2.php.

Anyway … here are some Bento pix I got from a good friend.  Thought I share this with you.

Have a good weekend and eat well!

This Is Why You Are Fat …

Ho ho ho … a friend at work fowarded me this link.  It’s about food and so I think I should share with you all.  Click on the image below and enjoy!

La Tandoor Restaurant in Steveston, Richmond

Suanne and I think we need to discover more about the restaurant scene at the Steveston area.  Located at the south western end of Richmond, we don’t normally drive there.  Wendy of Eat-n-About had done a number of good restaurant reviews in the area.  I like Wendy’s and her boyfriend reviews.  They like the same type of food Suanne and I like … so, every post of theirs are of interest to us and we make it a point to check out some of the restaurants they had reviewed on their site.  We like their style of writing too … very smooth easy reading.  Check their site out.

We thought we should have a closer look at Stevestone Village ourselves since we had already covered a lot of the restaurants in the Richmond City Center.  We were surprised how rich the area is in the variety of restaurants here.

La Tandoor is located on Moncton Street.  It is the main tourist stretch … so if you walk down that short stretch of road, you will not miss it.  Even when we were one street away, we could actually catch a heavenly waft of cooking curries.  It was without doubt where the smell came from.  Suanne and I found this amusing and was wondering if there were any complains from the neighboring restaurants.

La Tandoor had won numerous City awards over the years.  They proudly display them on their windows with the awards won for Readers Choice award for 2006 and 2007.  From the outside they do seem like they had seen better years.  It somewhat bothers me when characters are missing from the signage and not replaced because it could reflect on how they care for their business.  I really hope they will replace the missing alphabets quickly.

As always, we were at dinner early at 5PM.  There were only a couple of tables taken.  Not so evident from the outside, the restaurant could fit … oh … fifty people or so.  So it is quite large.  I like the earthy tone of their decor and it is well lighted with a skylight in the middle of the restaurant.  It is clean, no doubt about that.

We were attended by a man who looks like he own the place.  He greeted us and asked if we would like to check out their $17 buffet dinner.  Although the choices he described seems like a great deal but we declined.  We were not very hungry and we wanted to check out their real dishes.

La Tandoor served us water in these traditional water vessels.  They were quite heavy.  What are these made of, do you know?  Brass?  Copper?  I am sure there is a little story that can be told of these traditional water vessels.

We all like these cups (goblets?) because it came so cold which is so perfect for a hot day.

We were given two dips together with the water.  We were told that the dips were meant for the papadams.  One of them has a mild spiciness in it and is made from mint (the green one).  The other one is sweet and is made of tamarind.

Their thin papadam was awesome.  I wish they gave us more than just three.  They were large but we like it so much we wanted more.  Are papadams generally free in East Indian restaurants and people can ask for more (without extra charge) if they wanted? More on following page. Click here to continue reading

The Truth About Japanese Restaurants

I thought I share this YouTube with all of you.  I got this from Chow Town.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Burger King Freakout

A friend at work sent me this a couple of weeks ago.  It is so funny (and related to chow!) that I thought you all would also enjoy this as much as I did.

Ben :-)

Wedding in China

I got this series of pictures from a friend.  I have no idea where it is in China.   One can just imagine the logistics of organizing this.

I counted something like 500 tables here — making it a banquet for 5000 people.  Wowee!

Let’s think about this some more:

• Where would you put the bride and bridge groom’s table?
• What about washrooms?
• How do you deal with gate crashers?
• Seeing all the umbrellas, what if it rains?

What other problems can you think of that need to be addressed during the planning?

Enjoy.

More on following page. Click here to continue reading

Gold Medal Plates: The Quest for Canada’s Best Chef

I had meant to publish this blog post on Friday last week.  Before we managed to do that, our site went down without a single prior warning from the company which hosted chowtimes.  More about that later.  This post is about a TV show … as a matter of fact, this is about a TV show of things that are dearest to the hearts of most chowtimes readers … food AND Vancouver.

A couple of weeks ago, we received a package via Fedex with  a DVD.  That DVD contained a couple of episodes of a show called Gold Medal Plates.

For foodies in Canada, this is a MUST watch show.  It showcased the top restaurants in Canada battling for the title of “Canada’s Best Chef”.  Suanne and I watched the first two episodes from Toronto and Vancouver.  It was simply one of the most well made and action packed (yeah, action packed!) show about food we had watched.  Kind of made us proud that a Canadian production could produce such a show and give us a very good feeling that the Canadian culinary scene matches some of the best in the world.

The show actually started on Sunday last week (10May) with the first episode on Toronto.  All is not lost Vancouverites!  Tonight’s show is on Vancouver where the following restaurants slugged out to be the best of Vancouver:

• Blue Water Cafe
• Boneta
• C
• Cabana Grill
• Chow
• Fuel
• Kingyo
• Parkside
• Sooke House Harbour
• Tojo
• Westin Bayshore

Alright, I know … some of the restaurants above had recently closed because of the current poor economy.  The show was actually produced last year.  For those in the know, the results were well publicized.  Find out who won in Vancouver … and who ultimately claimed the title “Canada’s Best Chef”.

Showtime is at 9:00 PM Pacific on CTV’s Travel and Escape Channel (Channel 128 on Shaw, I think).

Guess who won in Vancouver?