Refuel

Even a few days after dining at Refuel, I am still traumatized by my dining experience in a supposedly a high-end fusion bistro on trendy West 4th ave in Vancouver. When it comes to fine dining, I always try to avoid downtown, yaletown or West 4th ave, where there seems to be a huge crowd of fancy restaurants with not-so-fancy-tasting food. All the good restaurants that I've been to are mostly scattered around corners of low-key neighborhoods, Fraiche, Harambe, Tojo's and etc. There are certainly some nice restaurants in downtown Vancouver, but the majority I've visited are more for people to hang out and feel important. That's mainly why those fancy schmancy restaurants are able to survive in a city like Vancouver - people go for the ambiance, the view, the music, the crowd, instead of the quality food. It seems to me that as long as a restaurant locates near water or has a nice view, it will survive and make a fortune regardless of the quality of food it serves. This blog serves as a decent outlet for us to identify and hence protest those overpriced, terrible cooking and pretentious restaurants, such as Burgoo.

Refuel is a restaurant with the most inconsistent cooking I've ever encountered. As a high-end restaurant as it is claimed, they do not serve complimentary bread and butter as pre-meal snacks. Snacks and drinks came real quick, literally within five minutes after ordering. Animo picked a glass of rather divine Australian Cabernet Sauvignon for me. Sauteed nettles, radish & chili was boring tasting, and fois gras croquette was a nice try. Appetizers arrived 15 minutes later, a plate of sliced soppressata and three slices of homemade bread with butter for Animo and wild leek risotto for myself. The risotto tasted heavenly, I thought to myself, it's a good indicator that main dishes would be just as good. Little did I know that risotto was the only thing that I can recall eating without a cringe on my face. Animo ordered a $20.5 pork which wound up to be six thin slices of pork, consisting 1/4 of fat, nesting on a pile of tasteless veggies. My main dish was a pure disaster - buttermilk fried chicken with gravy, coleslaw and jalapeno biscuit. I can't imagine that a professional bistro chef would mess up the one dish that requires minimum cooking skills. Three gigantic chunks of fried chick were mostly fat and skin. It was inedible. Whoever comes up with this recipe would be shot. It is the most expensive and disgusting tasting fried chicken I've ever had in my entire life. Therefore, after spending two hours at Refuel, mostly waiting for our food though, we left unsatisfied, angry and violated, with more than $120 dollars ripped out of our pockets.

But that's just a typical restaurant meal in Vancouver if you want to have something "nice". And that was just a random Thursday night dine-out. Restaurants seek out every single opportunities to rip people off, such as diluting alcoholic drinks by filling glasses up using ice-cubes. On special occasions, including Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, they would offer multiple-course set menus, they are nothing more than regular dishes bundled up for even pricier prices.