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!):