Sample Reviews
The price rating shown in the heading above each entry indicates the average cost of dinner for two with a modest wine, tax and tip. The cost of dinner, bed and breakfast (if available) is given in parentheses. Where one, two or three stars also appear in the heading, this indicates that, in our opinion, the restaurant has something unusual or outstanding to offer. Restaurants that represent exceptional value for money are indicated by the presence of a pointer. The map number assigned to each city, town and village gives its location on one or more of the maps at the front of the book.
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Go Fish is on the False Creek Fisherman’s Wharf at the end of 1 Avenue—a trailer painted blue with a blue-and-white striped awning. The awning shelters two or three tables from the rain, but there’s no heat and the nearest washroom is in the next block. But Go Fish is open year-round and it serves cod, halibut and salmon as fresh as any in the city. They dish up the fish on paper plates with a plastic knife and fork and nothing costs more than a few dollars. There’s room for a few cars in front and you can eat in your car if you find it too wet or cold under the awning.
Bryan Haber has been offering a ploughman’s lunch here for years, but last fall he visited Chatsworth in Derbyshire, where he found one he liked so much that he changed his recipe. He now makes the dish with aged cheddar, purple pickled onions and Baxter’s chutney. He was also having trouble getting Monty Python’s Holy Grail and Black Sheep ale, both of which he’s replaced with Imperial Stout, Nut Brown and Taddy Porter from Samuel Smith’s Yorkshire brewery. The best seller at the store is still the cheese scone, made with Ontario cheddar. There are now four cheese plates, as well as plates of pickled onions, Branston pickles and piccalilli. Needless to say, they’re still offering the only cream tea (with real Devonshire clotted cream) this side of Victoria. The house tea, Tippy Assam, comes from Betty’s Tea Shop in York. Every year Bryan Haber brings new soup recipes home from abroad; one of the best is a labour-intensive caramelized onion, garlic and parmesan broth. Recently he added a Matsqui prairie chowder, which combines corn, split peas and farmer’s sausage, to his list of chowders. There’s a huge assortment of British candies on the candy counter, all sold from big glass jars just as they used to be in the nineteen-thirties. They don’t sell much wine, but they do have a sassicaia from Bolgheri for 300.00 a bottle.
Rundles is designed for a hot summer day. Inside it’s decorated in white on white, relieved only by the tropical flowers and the stark black dress of James Morris at the door. In the kitchen, dinners (and lunches on weekends) are prepared by Neil Baxter six days a week all summer long. But nobody is ever tired at Rundles, where everything is calm and serene. The service is perfect, the cooking complex but convincing. Helpings are small, the atmosphere almost too elegant. Meals begin with grilled octopus with pickled cabbage, tartar of smoked salmon or sautéed foie gras with Banyul’s vinegar. Next come wild sea-bass, loin of lamb cooked sous-vide, confit of duck and rib-eye of beef. The meal ends brilliantly with a glazed lemon tart or, if you prefer, with a plate of unpasteurized cheeses. The wine-list is small and everything costs 53.50 a bottle. The list of open wines has at least one good buy—a pinot noir from Kim Crawford for 14.50 a glass. The ground-floor bistro offers such lovely things as charcuterie, all made in house, as well as grilled squid (with kohlrabi, papaya and mango) and lobster bisque, followed by a short list of main courses—rainbow trout with ginger and cardamom, braised-beef short-ribs and roasted grain-fed Cornish game hen. The macerated cherries that come at the end of the meal are marvellous. All this comes for little more than half the cost of dinner in the main restaurant.
We didn’t see the Key Man this year for the first time in almost 50 years. And the people who put together your hamburgers and fries now seem to be mostly girls. But there’s bigger news than that at Webers—they now have sixteen flavours of ice cream and they’re still serving Illy coffee in their espresso. More important still, they now have a slick new stainless-steel railway car that houses several brand-new washrooms. Webers beef is still all pasteurized by exposing it to a steam-blanket in a pressurized chamber at a temperature of 185ºF; it’s then stored at 30ºF, ground fresh daily and cooked to a temperature of 160ºF. Each week in summer they process and sell more than three tons of ground beef—50 tons a summer. Their fries all come from potatoes grown, cut and packed in Prince Edward Island. In fine weather you can eat outside at one of the brightly-painted picnic tables and watch your children playing on the Via Rail coaches. There’s even a coach, newly renovated, where you can sit inside when it’s raining. Teenagers take your order, make change and see that you get what you want within two minutes, no matter how long the lineup may be. On the first Tuesday in August there’s free corn for all comers. There’s rock music on the soundtrack and free parking for hundreds of cars on both sides of the highway, with an overhead bridge that connects the southbound lot to the restaurant.
This remarkable restaurant has an inconvenient location in the outer reaches of Dieppe, but it’s well worth looking for. You’ll find it in one of the oldest and most beautiful houses in the city, four miles south of Main Street on Highway 106. The dining-room is old-fashioned and dignified. Hélène Legras is in charge of the front of the house and the service is friendly and alert. The menu is small, the wine-list choice and very French. The cooking of Emmanuel Charretier is Parisian in style and extremely accomplished. He starts every meal with a lobster flan, a millefeuille of chanterelles or a torchon of foie gras. The lobster flan is breathtaking and the millefeuille is almost as good. The wild meats—red deer, bison and boar from a local game farm—are strong and rich, but always clean and surprisingly light. The sweets, especially the chocolate plate, are without equal. In fact, nothing at l’Idylle tastes as it does elsewhere. Everything is as light as a whisper. Emmanuel Charretier is probably the equal of anyone cooking in Canada today.
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