EAT! Vancouver serves up a feast

Bada bing, bada boom: Cinara chef Lucais Syme teamed up with Nick Nutting of Tofino’s Wolf in the Fog for EAT! Vancouver Food + Cooking Festival’s dinner series last night, and the two hit it out of the park.

The nine-course dinner was served family-style in the cozy downtown restaurant with its exposed brick walls and soft lighting.

Nutting, whose Tuff City restaurant has rightly earned stellar reception since it opened, including being named Canada’s best new restaurant by EnRoute magazine last year, brought with him several goodies from his back yard, which is of course the Pacific Ocean.

Talk about fresh: gooseneck barnacles were still in the salty sea the day before the dinner. The meat of these curious little creatures looks like an elephant trunk and tastes a bit like scallop, with slight lobster and prawn flavours, only chewier.

They’re cooked simply by pouring boiling water over top. The chefs served them up with a saffron aioli for a striking first plate.

Consommé with spot prawns, clams, and squash preceded a refreshing Dungeness crab salad that had fine herbs, preserved lemon, radish, and asparagus—flavourful and refreshing.

The first-of-the-season spring salmon came next, also unbelievably fresh and toothsome. The stuff comes from Nutting’s favourite fishing hole, Portland Point. Thick and flaky, the fish accompanied buttermilk-dressed organic butter lettuce with almonds and pickled wild leeks.

Two dishes came next: nettle-and-rabbit ravioli with rabbit jus and a foie-gras-and-chicken-liver parfait with honey-rye sourdough and apple preserve.

Perfectly cooked Mangalitsa pork shoulder followed, and diners were encouraged to eat every last bit of fat. Known as Mangalica (meaning “hog with a lot of lard”) pigs in their native Hungary,  Mangalitsas are renowned for their high fat content, which results in deeply flavourful meat. The chefs served it with Cipollini onions and sunchoke.

The next item almost stole the show. Picture a small white bowl with the most vivid sunset-pink clear liquid: room-temperature rhubarb and elderflower “soup” had fine pieces of fresh ginger and chunks of pink grapefruit as well as a dollop of plain yogurt. It was sensational, a dish that had everyone at the table oohing and ahhing, tempted to ask for seconds.

But then came the richest chocolate ice cream ever with just the right smidge of Maldon salt plus hazelnut-and-buckwheat cookie crumbs. Seconds, please?

Several paired wines augmented the whole experience: Backyard Vineyard Blanc de Noir Brut to enhance the flavour of the barnacles; Lake Breeze Sauvignon Blanc, with its hints of passion fruit and nettle, came with that prawn consommé; and Hester Creek Cabernet France Rose was paired with the spring salmon. Thornhaven Pinot Noir accompanied the foie-gras-and-chicken-liver parfait, the smoky Hester Creek Reserve Merlot (my favourite of the night) accompanied the pork shoulder. Elephant Island Framboise finished the meal off with that addictive ice cream.