Restaurants

In Vancouver, we are truly blessed with Japanese tapa and Izakaya style restaurants. If you want quiet, intimate and fusion, go to Umami. If you want down home, cheap, cheerful, noisy and full of Japanese, go to Guu on Thurlow, our first Izakaya love. If you want upscale Guu, go to Hapa Izakaya.

Barb and I had an excellent meal at Shiru-Bay (1193 Hamilton Street, 604 408-9315) tonight. The beef carpaccio in the photo above (with truffle oil) for $10.80 was our favourite, but we loved most everything. More tomorrow!

Too bad. I hope this is only temporary. I will miss Katzenjammer Don't know about the 'reliable staff' remark; the ones we dealt with were friendly and efficient.

From an email from Peter Caulfield:

QUOTE

Hi, VanEats -

Alas, before I had a chance to check it out, Libby's is no longer open for dinner. As well they are closed Mondays and now open at 7:00a.m instead of 6:30a.m. as they used to be. The 'hood is changing with the advent of the Brix condo development (official Brix site) and other new housing developments so I wouldn't be surprised to see these newcomers eventually resulting in Libby's and other places serving dinner.

The Wink Cafe (151 East 8th Avenue at Main, 604 264-1095) (via the newly launched Beyond Robson) sounds great (I've put it on the list of restaurants Barb and I should try). Too bad their website is invisible to search engines like Google (the menu while beautiful is a graphic and not text, so Google won't be able to index it).

Mmmm.

Here's an email tip we received about the recently opened Burger Etc. at 4091 Hastings Street (604 299-8959):

"this mom and pop shop features homemade (ground chuck steak) burgers, pulled pork sandwiches, beef brisket sandwhiches, ribs, chicken and their homemade fresh-cut fries and apparently addictive".

Sounds great! If anybody has tried it, please leave a comment or send us an email.

Jayant Bhandari again emailed us to verify that the name of the Indian Restaurant where Dosa Hut used to be at Clark and Hastings is indeed Rajni Bala's Indian Cuisine. Thanks!

Jayant Bhandari emailed us to let us know that he has opened an Indian restaurant with free WiFi (yes!) where Dosa Hut used to be at 1279 East Hastings, 604-628-8181 (Hastings at Clark). I put it on our list of places to check out because we love Indian food. In the meantime, please let us know if you have been there and what you thought! Question for Jayant: what is the name of the restaurant?

Please help Andrew if you know a good pasta restaurant for a bachelor party in downtown, Kits or Kerrisdale. (Thanks to DoubleClickChick and SaabKen for their suggestions).