Readers' Choice Winners

Critics' Picks

It was like herding cats to get this year’s panel together to judge the Golden Plates critics’ awards, but eventually we did. The cast of characters—who reported in person, by phone, and by e-mail—is as follows: wine and food authority Sid Cross; Iron Chef Rob Feenie; food stylist and journalist Nathan Fong; Jurgen Gothe, no introduction needed; fellow scribes Duncan Holmes and Judith Lane; Wine Access editor Jim Tobler; and writer, author, and former restaurateur Stephen Wong.

We started with a rundown of what’s happened since we last sat down around a table. Holmes summed it up as “a pretty tumultuous year, with all the movement of the key players”. Culinary speed dating by chefs, maître d’s, and everyone else was only one trend. As well as the Zagat guide, this city could have used a Begat guide, as popular spots produced nonidentical twins: West End Lolita’s spun off Me and Julio on Commercial Drive; Chambar Belgian Restaurant opened Café Medina next door; and Habit Lounge launched a new little sib, the Cascade Room. Also, Salt poured downstairs into Salt Cellar, and Andrey Durbach did a French take on his La Buca trattoria with Pied-à-Terre bistro, a bold move to Vancouver retail’s death row: the Cambie Street corridor (and a bright move, because that train will be running before you know it). And then there was all that stuff happening in Gastown, and about 100 new restaurants…

Gossip, most of it off the record—“He’s like cilantro or goat cheese. You either love him or hate him,” one judge remarked of a well-known local restaurateur—led to general discussion, with Wong admitting to second thoughts about constantly changing menus. “It means the chef is experimenting. There’s got to be a time when it comes out ugly. I would like to see more restaurants that do signature dishes and do them really well.”

Enough chat. Cross said, “What makes a restaurant the best is that it fills a niche. Sometimes we can give too much emphasis to a restaurant that’s formal.” The critics’ Best New Casual category means kick-back attitude, not sloppy plates. Far from it in the case of first-prize Boneta, where chef Jeremie Bastien, tooling around kitchens since the age of eight, sends out duck breast with maple-syrup-glazed beets, crabapple purée, and huckleberry sauce. Serious food, fun setting (mirrors hung lopsidedly from the ceiling), the menu projected onto the wall, and witty cocktails. We liked, just as we liked the exuberant Frenchness at Bistrot Bistro and So.Cial, Sean Cousins’s tripartite Gastown spot.

Too many deserving contenders in the restaurant-dense downtown peninsula area west of Main also made for lively debate, but the winner, we finally decided, was Blue Water Café + Raw Bar. “They really capture the essence of what the region, but also the neighbourhood, is about,” Tobler said. “It also has destination status,” he added, mentioning a much-travelled out-of-towner he met recently who called it one of the three best restaurants in North America.

Restaurant densification makes the West Side just as hard to judge. Bishop’s took it, followed by West and another “little guy”, neighbourhood trattoria La Buca, for its basso profundo Italian comfort food. The East Side is gaining growing numbers of good restaurants, but now hip-beyond-compare Main Street was, well, just Main Street when Jeff Van Geest dared to pioneer topnotch regional food there five years ago at his Aurora Bistro. It’s in lock step with the seasons still, as Lane noted, “one of the few restaurants that’s so hands-on and so in touch with their suppliers”, all reasons why it gets our vote for first on the East Side.

Another category change occurred, less subdivision than property assembly, when we expanded the Burnaby–New Westminster award to take in all the municipalities around Vancouver. Tobler called Scott Jaeger’s cooking at the Pear Tree “haute comfort cuisine. I don’t feel any sense of overworking or pretension, and it tastes fantastic.” Location, location. “They hit it right in terms of area [that]…was ready for a restaurant like that.” Best Other Metro saw this much-awarded Burnaby fave coming in first, ahead of the charming La Belle Auberge in Ladner and North Vancouver’s Gusto di Quattro. Five years or a decade from now, as the region grows, will we drive to fine eateries dotting the length of King George Highway and the Merry Hell Bypass? Tobler didn’t think so. “At a certain level of quality and price point, I don’t think suburban neighbourhoods have the critical mass of an audience.” But the burbs have food needs too. Ask Crave owner Wayne Martin, whose swanky new Fraîche just opened in West Vancouver, or Duncan Holmes, who lives in Delta and raises an interesting point about driving 30 or 40 kilometres to dine out: “We’re all carbon-conscious out here.”

If books have the Booker Prize, shouldn’t cooks have the Cooker Prize? It was time to decide the Golden Plates award for best chef. “What I really admire is his food is really pure,” Feenie said of winner Frank Pabst at Blue Water Café. “Frank doesn’t mask flavours. He’s refined in what he does. You can taste everything on the plate. He’s very much in tune with local ingredients and local suppliers. It’s for real. What’s really telling to me is that there’s a 140-seat restaurant and they’re dedicated to the kind of quality you’d find in a 40-seat restaurant. You have to be really organized and have the right staff to do that.” Perennial Yaletown favourite Pino Posteraro at Cioppino’s was very close behind, and a small “yeah” came from the female contingent when the skills of Meeru Dhalwala in the kitchen at Vij’s were recognized with those of her better-known husband, Vikram Vij, in an award that acknowledges both.

If 2007 was a year of change, it was also a year of deep pockets. Creating that ocean-liner mood at the 12,000-square-foot Shore Club cost a cool $8 million. Yew, the smart new lounge/bar/restaurant, ran up a $4-million bill replacing the tired Garden Lounge in the Four Seasons. And it cost $3 million for the Goldfish Pacific Kitchen. But money wasn’t everything. “Vancouver is not as glam as Toronto,” Fong said. “I think our focus is more on the kitchen than appearance. We still shine in the kitchen, hands down.”

It was coming down to the wire. “I think that there are too many restaurants in Vancouver,” Gothe said. “People are so eager to open restaurants that they don’t pay attention to the whole package.” And that segued nicely into Bishop’s. Our Critics’ Classics award, a category we launched last year, pays tribute to the rock-solid restaurants that, while not necessarily in the spotlight, just consistently do it well. “Bishop’s is Bishop’s,” Gothe said. “Good service, good food, a comfortable environment.” Who could ask for anything more?