Herons (at Fairmont Hotel, Downtown)

So we were hanging around Canada place and always wanted to try the restaurant with tall glass windows across from Canada place. Herons is a fine dining restaurant located inside Fairmont. The place looks beautiful from outside from the 20 foot tall glass windows facing the Burrard Inlet.

   
Regrettably, the view is recently partially blocked by the new convention center, but it was still quite nice.
Shortly after orders, we were presented with the usual bread appetizers, but with an interesting “dip”. It was two types of homemade butter. The green one is a vegetable based butter which tasted cucumber/avacado’ish and the yellow is regular but really smooth butter.

I thought the portions were little on the small side (a given, but still a tad smaller than my expectation). I can tell that they certainly have spent more time preparing the dish compared to an average restaurant. I order the prawn and scallop risotto which I thought was decent but was not cheesy enough.

 
In regards to risotto, nothing beaten the wild mushroom three cheese risotto I had at The Cannery. In fact talking about it makes me want to go there soon, so I will be reviewing that once again.

Thai House (Burnaby)

This is actually my third time to Thai House, once in Richmond and twice in Burnaby. There are multiple branches: Richmond, Burnaby, North Vancouver , Downtown and Kitsilano. It is owned by a chain of restaurants including Samba Steakhouse, Chilli House and Urban Thai Bistro.

I enjoy coming here with 3 or more friends as most of the dishes really has to be shared to enjoyed. Thai House has a warm ambiance and many Thai decorations inside the restaurant. The place is usually pretty busy with a diverse group of customers.

As it was a very hot day (record breaking heatwave in Vancouver!), we immediately ordered some drinks; The Royal Thai and Pina Colada for myself, both virgin. The Royal Thai drink was made of blended lychee and coconut milk juice which yields a very unique (and good) taste I thought, very refreshing on a hot day.

In terms of ordering, the majority of the food on the menu are spicy but you can request mild even if shows "3 chilli's". As both of us cannot really stand too much spice, we ordered the Chicken lettuce wrap without any spice as appetizer and we thought it was great!

Presentation overall for all of our dishes were decent but nothing spectacular. We had the Thai peanut sauce on chicken breast strips (forgot the Thai name), with spinach undedeath. Above is the fried salmon with creamy garlic sauce. I thought this was a very interesting dish. The sauce is like a creamy tomato garlic sauce. It tastes a little like a western dish and it could use a tiny bit more thai spice/herbs flavouring to make it taste more Thai'ish.

None of the dishes came with rice, so you have to order rice seperately. We ordered two bowls of coconut rice which came in one big bowl (above). I guess they steam the rice using coconut milk and call it that way, which makes the rice smell nice.

I noticed some people around our table ordered the "Thai Ice Tea" and it looked very interestingly "red" so I just had to try it! It came and I noticed it smelled similar to an HK cafe ice milk tea but stronger in terms of the tea smell. It tastes like nothing I've drank before and the best I can describe it is it LIKE a HK ice milk tea except it is much stronger in terms of the tea and is abit minty. Definatley an acquired taste. Does anyone know how they make this?

Our bill came to $60.59 for two of us and I thought it was a little pricy. I noticed that alot of the food in Thai restaurants overlaps with Malaysian restaurants such as Tropika so I sometimes wonder whether a dish is originally Thai or Malay. I guess those two places ARE close together.

No. 9 Restaurant

We went to No. 9 because the parking lots of two of the places we wanted to go were really really busy. Sigh, when will Richmond be car friendly? Anyway No. 9 restaurant is a very popular 24/7 Chinese restaurant where you can get a variety of Chinese food at a decent price, decent taste and convenience. There is so many things to choose from I doubt anyone has ate every single dish here. You often see 3-4 menus on average once you are seated.

Sorry for the blurry photo, but it was thundering lions so I was quickly pacing inside. I'm sure EVERYONE knows where it is now. If not, it is facing No.3 road in Landsdown mall. Parking is plentiful.

As usual, the place is fairly busy no matter what time it is. I'm very impressed at how well they do over these years. Ambience is very busy with servers and people moving around no matter where you look. Service as expected is pretty much described as giving you the menu, taking orders and giving you the bill. We ordered a 3-course meal for $33.95 which were all decent. All 3 dishes came very quickly.

Here is a the "BBQ combo" which has chinese style sweet soy sauce pork "char siu", and fried pork "siu yok". I'm actually not really sure how the fried pork is prepared. You always see them hanging as a whole pig in front with the orange fried skin. Do they literally throw the whole pig on a large fire grill and grill it?

Above is the Beef and Brocolli and below is the Chicken with pepper sauce that you don't see very well . Although both dish were pretty simple, it tasted good and there were generous amounts of meat on both dish.

Overall, the food was decent, came quick and price was decent so who argue with that? To be specific on the food, personally, I find it is abit heavy on the sauce/grease and there definately is MSG because I had to drink water non-stop that night. And if you are looking for something "nice", this is probably not the place for you. No. 9 will always be in the back of my head if I cannot think of something and just want some food.

Some menus below:

Cafe De Waraku

After checking out sand sculptures (which was quite nice, pic below) at Aberdeen centre, we decided to head for lunch at a nearby recently opened cafe called "Cafe De Waraku" on Hazelbridge and Browngate Rd. This place is marketed as a fusion Japanese Italian pasta place. I must say, it certainly sparked my interested as this is probably the first place in Vancouver to fill this niche.

Decor is decent, fairly "HK cafe" like. It is quite clean as expected of a new place. Service was friendly but they did not seem to speak english that well and I assume the owner and all the workers are Cantonese as all the servers spoke it. The menus has lots of visuals which I like so I can see what I am ordering. There is even a big screen TV with scrolling photos of their food. You can see their whole menu on their website: http://www.cafedewaraku.com/menus.html For lunch until 4pm, all pastas (ranging from $5.99 to $8.99) come with a complimentary drink (cold add $0.75) which was nice.

I ordered the Crab and Fresh Tomatoes with Creamy Tomato Sauce because Sayaka cooked something similar once and it was really delicious. Presentation looks decent with REAL crab meat. However, other than that, I have to say the taste was decent at most. The pasta is missing a unique "kick" that makes authentic Italian pasta taste good (not the ones at HK cafe). Having cooked something similar, Sayaka suspects that they specifically did not pre-panfry the ingredients and sauce with garlic and italian herbal spices, and is also missing parmesan. The ingredients and sauce are most likely pre-prepared and slapped together with cooked pasta like the way subs are made at sub-way.

She ordered the Asparagus and Scallops also with Creamy Tomato sauce and tastes similar to mines except with aspargus and scallops. I felt the scallops were cut a little too thin to taste any texture from the scallop.

For dessert, they have a good selection of cakes and cheesecakes for $5.50. Since there were ads of their famous homemade Panna Cotta stickered all over the walls for $2.50, I decided to try one. The taste was again, decent but the texture needs more work as it was very rough. I was expecting a creme brulee sort of smooth texture and this was nothing like that. As in the picture below, you can see a "skin" on top. I suspect that it might have been sitting in the fridge for awhile.

Overall, the price and taste are good and we left full. But, at the end we felt leaving a little bit disappointed and probably won't be back. Another thing is that I was not thrilled they did not accept the coupons they posted on their website. The reason given to me was that they are only for dinner which are stated no where on the coupon. One of the coupons that specifically allow you to use during "Tea-time" was also rejected as they say they do not have "Tea-Time" yet. We were at the place when it was 2pm. The place definitely had a good marketing plan but failed to execute in the final product.

On the other hand, the sand sculpture displayed at Aberdeen that day was spectacular (just look at the details!):

Negative Space Chinese Restaurant

Our first post is going to be a about a newly opened Chinese Tapas restaurant called Negative Space located at the corner of McKim and Odlin in Richmond. It is located on the outside corner of "Tai Gu" complex (free 3 hour parking).

The first thing that came into my mind was the name, Negative Space, which was awkward name to promote a positive first impression I thought. Based on the Chinese name which directly translates into "Black White Smell", I can certainly see where they were trying get. Regardless, the place is actually quite nice and definately a niche!

The decor is best described as chique modern with a fusion of Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese tapas place. We were greeted by a friendly server. When we were seated, we are served with what tasted like a mixof Jasmine and Green tea, very unique.

We first ordered the deep fried taro dish.

It was very flavourful and crunchy, but not something you want to eat by itself as it is quite strong in flavour. We ordered a bowl of rice to go with it which is the way I recommend it. Also, most of the dishes are a little bit spicy, so if you don't like spicy, ask for no spice. I would prefer if they cut the taro into thicker pieces so I can taste the texture of the taro instead of all crunch.

This mango salad was very refreshing as it was a hot day. Underneath the mountain of mango are thin slices of cucumber and carrot, simple but tastes good. As you can see they give you generous amounts of mango.

Next came the BBQ Rib Eye Beef skewers, this was as I expected. Meat texture was decent and taste was perfect for me. The dip was not really needed as the marination was fairly strong as is. The dip seemed to taste like a mix of those hotpot "Sa Cha" sauce with abit of other sweet spices.

Last came our Sticky Rice Stuffed Squid which was not bad. Flavour
again is very good. The texture was slightly chewy for the squid and
slightly too mushy for the sticky rice. We had a coupon for $5 off
which was in the Sing Tao newspaper and our bill came to $21.63 and we
were comfortably full.

All in all, our experience was here great and I would come back here
with friends to try out their other dishes. Supposedly, they have set
lunches for $8.50 and up. There some things that can be improved on
but given the reasonable price and it's niche unique fusion asian
food, ambiance and good service, I would definately go there and try
at least once.

Van Gohan OPENS!

What the heck is Van Gohan you might ask?

Van - is actaully a playful pun to mean "Vancouver" and "Night" at the same time. Van is obviously short for Vancouver and Van pronounced in Japanese, is the same as "Ban" which means Evening. Together with gohan, "BanGohan", means dinner or the evening meal in Japanese.

Gohan - means rice or "meal" in Japanese and as mentioned, together with Van/Ban, it means dinner.

However, we will not only keep you guys finger licking off our Vancouver dinner blogging but often times we will be posting breakfasts, lunch and snacking places that we enjoy so very much and perhaps even some mini-travel adventures within our beautiful local Greater Vancouver area!!

Hope you guys enjoy the beginning of our adventures!