1st Visit: Chambar

For Will's 23rd birthday, we went to Chambar (562 Beatty Street, 604 979-7119). It's a beautiful room that is airy and warm and trendy but not so much that you feel like you need a makeover!

Most importantly, the food is delightful. Everything I tried from the olives ($6) to the Belgian poutine ($7, see picture below) to the classic mussels in white wine ($17) sauce was excellent. I only wish that they had had the deep, dark bitter Belgian beer, Petrus Oud Brun ($7, but maybe it's a blessing in disguise since the reviews don't sound good) which they were temporarily out of stock and that their website had an RSS feed (sorry to be a broken record about this but in 2005, it's a trivial and cheap addition to your website and allows influential early adopters and connectors to keep up with what's new without having to tediously manually surf the site!). Definitely will be back for a mini-review!