Updated 18th Nov 2010: This restaurant has been closed according to Urbanspoon.
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 panoramic 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 Caeser 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.
For the main, we had the Stuffed Yorkshire Pudding. It is stuffed with tender slices of roast beef, topped with sauteed onions and gravy. The sides includes garlic mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables.
The Yorkshire Pudding is like a giant creme puff wich is lightly crunchy on the outside and hollow in the inside, just perfect for stuffing.
Our second main entree is Wild B.C Salmon with coconut cranberry crust. It is topped with fruit salsa and served on basmati rice and with seasonal vegetables. Salmon has always disappoint me as it always turn out dry. We love the crispy crust though. The basmati rice is not flavoured and we wished there were more fruit salsa to go with the rice. Perhaps we should have gone with the Tandoori Chicken Breast as our second entree.
There were only two desserts on the menu, so that makes it much more easier to choose; just one of each to share. The first dessert is Elephant & Castle Brownie. The dense brownie is topped with chocolate sauce and served with ice-cream. I always enjoy a dense and chocolaty brownie.
The next dessert is a Bread Pudding with berry compote. Polly enjoyed this as the the bread pudding is very soft and eggy. The serving is quite large.
Overall, this is a value for money Dine Out Vancouver compare to the more expensive ones. The total bill came to $44 for both of us including tips.
I agree that this is a great value–I can’t wait to do the Dine About Town in San Francisco. Thanks for your inspiration, and the picture of that yorkshire pudding!
Elephant & Castle is the name of an old decrepit underground railway station in London, synonymous with misery, can’t imagine why they brought the name over if the Brits have got anything to do with it.
Hi, I just went to the Elephant & Castle and had a very different experience. The top part of the pub doesn’t allows minors. The bottom part allows minors, except at the bar. We went on a Saturday night and it was packed with families having dinner. All our food was plain and cold. Not worth the amount asked. Especially the ceasar salad, it consisted of romaine lettuce, a little bit of dressing and 5 small croutons for $9.50 ($2 extra for garlic toast). The service was good though. Overall, it wasn’t as nice an experience as yours.