All Entries Tagged With: "Food Festivals"

Greek Summer Festival 2009

Suanne and I were invited by Amir, the Executive Director of the Greek Summer Festival, to the event to experience Living A Day The Greek Way.  Suanne and I had been having way too many invites these days but this was one event we could not turn down because we felt we had so much to learn.

We met Amir and to our surprise, he had actually gotten the people behind the event together so that we could meet them.  Never in our imagination how much history there are behind this annual event.

The Greek Summer Festival had started as a one day event 23 years ago organized by the Greek Orthordox Community of East Vancouver.  The event’s main goal is to raise funds (this year they partner with Make a Wish Foundation) and to introduce to Vancouver the richness of Greek culture, traditions and FOOD!

They told us how this one day event grew from one-day event to an event that spans two weekends around Canada Day.  This year’s event runs from June 26th to July5th.

George Economous was our host of the evening who was gracious enough to spend two hours that day to bring us around the place and showed us the event behind the scene.  He he he … Suanne and I felt like we were on a guided tour of Greece!  We were so intrigued by the stories we are hearing we decided to learn more before digging in to the food.  But since this is a food blog, I gonna share with you the most important aspect of this festival … FOOD … especially …

… LAMBS.   If there is only one thing we came away impressed, it was the lamb.  Being Chinese who generally finds lamb gamey, we ended up thinking of lamb in a much different light.

The Greek Summer Festival sold a whopping 465 lambs within 10 days in the festival last year.  This year, they are on track to break last year’s count and I am not going to be surprised.  We met George “The Real Boss” (the person above is George “the Host”).  George “the Real Boss” is the man behind these lambs since the inception of the Greek Summer Festival.  Boy, he sure has lots of stories to tell and BBQ burn scars to show too!!

They used to do this by hand and using charcoal but today they have a whole row of rotisseries imported from Greece that slowly cooks this.  It takes four hours of slow cooking to make each.  They use the very best New Zealand lamb because of the tenderness of the meat and of the consistent size.  They tried to use local lambs but gave up because it was best only during Easter period.

They used to chop the lamb piece by hand.  It is impossible to keep up with the demands that they had introduced new ways and machines to do the job better and faster.

Many people actually come to the Greek Summer Festival only for their lambs.  People would drop by the festival on their way home to pick the lambs on the spit up by the kilo ($32) or half-kilo ($16).

Some people even order the whole lamb.  That is $185 and is more than enough for 20 people.  They will cut it to your choice.  Sometimes there are customers who comes in a group and order an entire lamb to feast at the festival.  That would be fun!

This is what Suanne and I had — the Lamb Dinner, Bone-In.  This is wonderful … perfecto in every aspect. More on following page. Click here to continue reading

EAT! Vancouver 2009

EAT! Vancouver is back for the seventh year.  It is going to be held at the same place … BC Place Stadium from Friday to Sunday.  Suanne and I had a pair of tickets courtesy of the organizer (thanks Laura!) and will certainly be there to check the place out.

Entrance is $12 if you get it online ($15 from the gate).  We had always enjoyed the Celebrity Stage shows.  There is of course the Bite of Vancouver where you could get small serving of food (at $4 or less) from participation restaurant including:

• Ashiana Tandoori
• Cassis Bistro
• Shark Club Bar & Grill
• New India Buffet
• Goldilocks Bakery
• Mama Mia’s Gelato
• Jamaican Jerk Cuisine
• Atithi Restaurant
• Dona Cata Mexican Restaurant
• Maurya Restaurant
• Schokolade Cafe
• Sweet Chili Cafe
• Big Al’s Soul Food
• Zin, Restaurant & Lounge

You can also count on trying lots of samples of the participating exhibitors too.  More info available from their website here.  We are planning to go on Sunday — hope to bump into some of you foodies there!

Ben and Suanne

Taste BC 2009

You know, one of the things we enjoy a lot with food blogging is when we get invited to events. Suanne and I was invited as “media” to cover the Taste BC event which held on Thursday last week. Ooooo … “media”, fancy huh? LOL!

Angie (Sea Salt with Food) who is a wine enthusiast joined us. We like that because we are such babes when it came to wine and we wanted to learn from the event. I thought that we would only spend like 30-45 minutes but ended staying for almost 3 hours. We had a great time at the event.

Taste BC is more of a wine than fine food event. The event is presented by the Liberty Merchant Company in the effort to bring together the best of BC wines. All proceeds from the event went to the Oak Tree Clinic of the BC Children’s Hospital. I am afraid we did not take many photos of the wine although I did try quite a lot that night.

Our favourite was simply the Ice Lady ice wine from the Forbidden Fruit Winery. Surprisingly, almost all the food blogs that covered the event also picked this as a favourite. I want to say that no one pushed this to us to blog but for some reason it just stands out. It is made of Pink Lady Apple and is very sweet and fruity. It does not reek of alcohol at all. Suanne who does not drink loves this.

I also like the Victoria Gin. They first gave me a shot of Victoria Gin which was awful, like drinking jet fuel. Then they added Tonic Water which made it like a million times better. Nice.

We also had sake and learned a lot of flexibility of this brew … that how this is about the only liquor that can be served both hot or cold and its ability to be paired with any type of cuisines.

The Garibaldi Honey Pale Ale (from the Howe Sound Brewing Company) was another one I like … it was smooth and light with a hint of honey.

In all, there are over 60 wine and drink participants with an average of 5 types of wine showcased. It was impossible to try every one of them for sure … for us at least. On to food …

The Wild Sockeye Salmon on Artisan Bread was presented by a “baby” restaurant in Gastown. It is interestingly called “2 Chefs and a Table” which had just opened for 7 months.

We like the sushi from Miku Restaurant a lot. As a matter of fact, we went back for seconds … and thirds … and fourths. More on following page. Click here to continue reading

Dine Out Vancouver 2009: Elephant & Castle Restaurant – Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel

Polly and I also take the opportunity to go for a Dine Out Vancouver meal in place of our regular cake meet. Since we can only go for lunch as Polly has to pick her twin daughters from school before 2:30 pm, our choices is very limited. We ended up with Elephant & Castle Restaurant at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel which offers the lunch option from 11:00 am.

Elephant & Castle Restaurant is on the banks of the Fraser River and has a panaromic view of the oceans and mountains. Parking is free if you dine in the restaurant.

Unfortunately, it is a very foggy day and the view is very limited. Nevertheless, the mistiness adds a sense of mysteriousity to the dining experience.

Elephant & Castle is North America’s leading British Pub and Restaurant chain across Canada and United States. This location has a fairly large seatings on 2 levels. It has a bar and thus minors are not permitted.

Elephant & Castle offers a 3 course menu for the Dine Out Vancouver 2009 for $18.

For appetizer, we opted for a soup and a salad. Polly and I decided to share our dishes and we asked the waitress for extra bowl to share the soup. The waitress is kind enough to serve the soup in 2 different bowls and gave us extra serving plates for sharing for the rest of the meal. I like their services. Back to the soup, the soup of the day is Seafood Chowder. It’s a creamy soup with salmon, prawn and potatoes with crackers served on the side. It’s quite an ordinary chowder.

There is a choice of Classic Ceaser Salad and Tossed Green Salad in Raspberry Vinaigrette and we opted for the latter. We like the flavour of the vinaigrette which is very fruity. More on following page. Click here to continue reading

Dine Out Vancouver 2008 – Gastropod

Updated 4 June 2009: closed (source from Urbanspoon)

Suanne and I had always been mesmerized by the legend of the top restaurants in the world. Namely, the El Bulli and the Fat Duck. Some day, we hope to have the opportunity to dine out in one these places. For now, we settle for something more attainable … a restaurant owned by a chef who had worked in one of these restaurant.

The chef behind Gastropod is Vancouverite Angus An who according to his biography is said to had a stint in the Michelin 3-stars Fat Duck. In the local scene, Gastropod had won many awards and perhaps one of the best restaurants along 4th Ave in Vancouver.

Featuring modern European cuisine, Gastropod had won the Gold Award for Best New Fine Dining and Silver Award for Best Design from the Vancouver Magazine’s 18th Annual Restaurant Awards. We knew that we would not go wrong with such a restaurant … and we were right.

The setting is chic and inviting with white linen and simple lines. Best of all, the service is very friendly, sincere and unpretentious. They did their very best to connect to us which made our entire experience very enjoyable.

BTW, Gastropod’s DOV menu is $35 per person.

Someone must make it mandatory for all restaurants to provide bread, like they provide glasses of water for each table … don’t you agree? Gastropod is one of those who had simple but great bread. Their butter had sprinkles of salt which really enhances the flavour. When we finished the bread, they promptly came by asked if they could give us more.

For the appetizer, we had their Duck Two Ways which came as a “$5 supplement”. This is a 24-hour confit leg, liver parfait and cucumber salad. Oh man, this appetizer could very well be the main course. The duck leg was was really tender inside and crisp outside. I am not sure what 24-hour confit mean … you reckon they really cooked this in confit for 24 hours?

The pate on the other hand was creamy, smooth and lightly salty which melt in your mouth, lightly salty. This really is worth the $5 supplement.

Suanne had the Seared scallops which is also a $5 supplement. It is a simple dish cooked with Gribiche sauce (like Tartare sauce) served with a few Serrano ham and shaved vegetable salad. The star of this is undoubtedly the fresh and “springy” scallops.

For the main, we had the 36-hour Braise Pork Shoulder. This is the biggest chunk of pork meat we had come across so far. 2″ tall, it was really tender. I think it must have been like 3/4 lbs of meat here.

The light custardy sabayon (Zabaglione) drenches the pork shoulder with a few fried shallots. This dish is great, perhaps except that it had too much meat! The sides of spinach and shiitake balances the heaviness of the pork shoulder.

For me I had the “$8 supplement” Duo of Venison. That is what it is … two venison dishes in one. On top is the roasted loin of venison cooked perfectly medium rare. Below that is the venison bolognaise which was more pasta than anything else as far as I remember.

What we did not like is the strong chinese medicine (yoek choy) taste of the sauce.

Knowing Suanne, she will go for the Gastropod Cheesecake. It was a small slice of warm cheesecake and balanced with a mixed berry compote and sorbet.

For me, I decided to go for another of their “$5 supplement” — the Cheese Platter. There are 5 varieties of local and international cheeses. They did describe what the cheese were but for the life of me, the only one I remembered was the “5 year cheddar”.

It came on a wooden platter arranged with candied walnut, crispy bread and a sweet “pate” thingy that we don’t know what it was.

How do you go about tasting the cheese … I mean, the right way? For us, we stack them up … base it with the crispy bread, followed by the cheese, then the sweet-pate-thingy and topped with the candied walnut. It was fabulous.

Total bill came up to $120 plus drinks, taxes, tips. We enjoyed the meal.

There you go … the last of our series of Dine Out Vancouver 2008. Good thing we did not gain any weight after all these dine outs!

Dine Out Vancouver 2008 – Chambar

I had been to Chambar twice before with the last time during last year’s Dine Out Vancouver. However, this year, I decided to go there again because Suanne had never been there before and wanted to try their famous mussels.

Chambar is a Belgian restaurant located on Beatty St just outside that Stadium Skytrain station in Vancouver. Our reservation was for 5PM. By the time we arrived 5 minutes before, many had arrived earlier and waited at the lounge. We can see that Chambar is perhaps one of the most popular DOV venue.

We got seated in the inner dinner hall which I preferred because it is wider and had a big window (not that there is a view from it anyway). One thing you will notice about Chambar is that the walls are decorated with art pieces which they help local artists showcase their work.

Just a couple of tables away was a group three Asian diners who also whipped out cameras and took pictures of their food. For a moment, we were wondering if they are one of food bloggers we know. We tried to establish eye-contact but failed. I thought it will be great to say hi to bloggers.

Oh, we were also told that we had only 1.5 hours for DOV. We understand the reason why.

Since this is a Belgian restaurant, I chose a Belgian beer. They had a good selection Trappistes beer which is renowned to be “all one needs” and are known to be brewed in monasteries by monks. I got myself the Rochefort 8 which is 9.2% alcohol. Small bottle but packs quite a punch.

For the appetizer, we had the La Salad d’Hiver. This is a Belgium endive and watercress salad with cranberry and vanilla vinaigrette. Stacked up high and had fresh crunch but otherwise, it was pretty tasteless save for the vinaigrette.

The next appetizer is one of the most interesting we ever had. It’s called the Carpaccio de Chevreuil. It is very thinly sliced (but also salty) venison and served together with crispy golden Yukon potatoes and roasted garlic and horseradish tapenade. Together they pack a good mixture of texture.

My main was the Truite et Ravioli. It is basically a trout and ravioli dish. The trout was crusted with absinthe butter while the pepper and goat cheese ravioli was roasted. It was quite bland. Frankly, this was not the star of the meal.

The star of the meal is none other than the Mussels Congolaise. It came in a big pot with a lid that you use to discard the shells.

The mussels were cooked with a tomato coconut cream, smoked chili and lime. We ordered a bread roll ($3!) as a side to dunk. It’s such a waste for good soup. Bread should be free especially with this.

And the mussels were simply the fattest, juiciest we had ever tried. I had mussels in Chez Leon in Brussels just last year and there is simply no comparison to good old Vancouver mussels.

Since I had been raving about the frites I had in Brussels, Suanne wanted to see what the fuss is even though we know this is really Vancouver fries. It was pretty much the same as any fries we had locally. This small cup is $5.

Pot de Creme is a green tea (Matcha) pot de creme and topped with lemon sable & blueberry compote. It was light and not overly sweet.

The Belgian Waffle was served warm and crispy and topped with homemade vanilla ice-cream and warm chocolate sauce.

In all, this is about the only DOV dinner that we came away absolutely full. There were a lot of food partly because of the extra pomme frites and bread roll we ordered. That big pot of mussels did help too. This is a $25 per person plate. The total bill came up to $83.

We like Chambar because of the reasonable prices. You should go try their mussels. I think you will like it.

Dine Out Vancouver 2008 – Aurora Bistro

Updated 4 June 2009: closed (source from Urbanspoon)

It was Saturday night — one of those DOV nights that were unrushed, unlike some of the nights where we had to rush from work to dinners. It has unbelievably busy at work in that I hardly had time to to even have a proper lunch. So, I treasure my weekends a lot more these days.

We went to the Aurora Bistro located on Main Street in Vancouver. This was a last minute change of venue from an earlier booking for Pub fare. It’s surprising that we even got a table considering how absolutely packed the bistro is on a Saturday night with a DOV event on.

We were the first in and within just 20 minutes, all the tables were already taken up. They had a sign posted by the door that due to the demand during the DOV, there is a 2 hour limit for each table.

We had never been to Aurora before but had heard a lot about them. I had imagined that they would be rather big and posh. However, the place is long and narrow with just enough tables arranged in two rows.

I guess looks can be deceiving because for what it’s worth, the Aurora Bistro is actually a Gold Medal winner of the Vancouver Magazine’s Annual Restaurant Award. They won the 2007 Best Regional Restaurant of the Year for contemporary West Coast cuisine.

We started off with the Aurora Cocktail. It is a gin, Elephant Island apricot wine, and fresh lemon juice served up with a splash of BC bubble. It’s Aurora signature sparkling cocktail. They loaded up the gin quite a bit which got me quite tipsy for a while.

The appy was a great start with what called the Sloping Hill Pork Rilettes with quince mustard and cornichons. Rillettes are made by slow cooking pork in lots of fat until it’s very tender. It is then shredded and then mixed in enough of the cooking fat to form a paste. The pork was cold and had sourish pickles. The quinche mustard certainly went well with the thin crusty and crispy toast. More so, the pate like rilettes was dense.

The Smoked Sablefish Brandade Cake on the other hand was warm. It was served on top of tomato chutney and topped with daikon, frisee salad. Quite French and quite a good start.

Suanne had the Harissa Roasted Ling Cod which was served with warm puy lentil, carrot and parsley salad in preserved lemon vinaigrette.

There were lots of lentil beans. We had never had lentils like this before as we normally see them mashed. The ling cod was flaky and great but our gripe is that it is just one small miserable piece only. Given another choice we would have chosen the Half Cornish Game Hen which we saw our neighboring table had.

The Roasted Bison Eye of Round was served with celery root gratin in red wine blackberry jus. It was some of the best meat we had but again the serving is really small. There are only two small rounds, hardly enough to call it a meal. The gratin went superbly well with the red wine blackberry jus. Don’t get us wrong — the food was great but the quantity is lacking.

The Fig Sticky Toffee Pudding served with creme fraiche was hot and sweet. Creme fraiche is like sour cream but not as heavy or sour.

Then there was the Red Wine Poached Pear with dark chocolate pate. We were not really sure what pate really meant. We thought that pate meant something like liver and such but chocolate? Anyway, the chocolate pate was very much like softened dark chocolates and with some sprinkles of coarse salt — great idea as it gave a great contrast of bitterness, sweetness and saltiness.

In all, dessert was the best among all. The mains were disappointingly lacking on quantity but overall, the quality was apparent. This is a $35 menu and so the total bill for the two of us came up to $100. Nice meal, nice experience.