Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant (Robson)

Vancouver is one of the best cities that offers an extensive variety of international cuisines, and even with food from the same region, it can be dramatically different in its taste and cooking techniques. For example, regular Indian dishes have little resemblance to dosas from Southern India or Sri Lanka. Among all the cuisines available in Vancouver, Chinese food perhaps offers the most amazing diversity in its dishes based on its original regions the food comes from - Hongkong, Taiwan, Szechuan, Hunan, or the types of dishes - noodles, hotpot, congee, dim sum, etc. Perhaps because of the huge Cantonese population in Vancouver, Cantonese restaurants seem to dominate Chinese restaurants. Among the less dominant Mandarin restaurants in Vancouver, Szechuan food seems to be considered as the typical Mandarin food for some reason.

There are quite a few Szechuan restaurants scattered around the city, Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant being one of them. We tried its main location on Commercial Drive twice in the past, and none of those two dining experiences left extraordinary impression on us. They recently opened up a new location right on Robson and Jervis Street about two months ago. It is much smaller, and carries less extensive menu than its main location.

When we arrived the restaurant, there was exactly one person dining there during lunch hours on a Saturday in central downtown Vancouver. Not exactly a good sign. Their menu looks decent, however, each dish's market price is about 3 dollars more than I would expect to pay for Chinese food. We ordered Dan dan noodle with pork chops and Chongqing Chicken.

Food arrived fairly quickly, not surprising considering we were the only diners in the restaurant. A bowl of dan dan noodles in seemingly spicy broth came with a plate of pork chops. Finely chopped green onions were sprinkled on top. Of note, I find it weird to have pork chops as a side dish. It's like ordering dumplings and they throw in a side dish of smoked beef. Noodles were nice and chewy, and pork chops were delicious. Despite the heavy chili oil floating on the broth, the noodles were not Chongqing level spicy. The second dish, Chongqing Chicken, was brought to us five minutes after. It's diced, spicy chicken nested on a mat of fried spinach. After having the dan dan noodles, I find the taste of Chongqing chicken too salty for my liking, but it's otherwise tasty and spicy enough to be qualified as Szechuan food, though I had to wash down the heavy sodium taste with a can of diet coke.

I haven't been to Szechuan or Chongqing personally, but my grandfather grew up in Szechuan and he told me a lot about Szechuan and its local food. People in Szechuan have a relatively slow living pace - you would see many people walking around in the park, playing chess on the street or drinking tea during regular working hours. They enjoy low-key life and that kind of lifestyle is perfectly reflected in their local cuisine. Nothing is fancy, and nothing requires rare, expensive ingredients - unlike Cantonese cuisine often uses high quality seafood even in dim sum and congee. What makes Szechuan food outstanding is the diversity of its street food. Szechuan people have the ability of turning the most boring meal of the day, breakfast, into a gourmet feast. Randomly pick a street in Szechuan and walk down at 6 am in the morning, you would find a ton of food stands selling breakfast - all kinds of buns (meaty or sweet), dumplings, a variety of noodles (rice noodles, glass noodles, buckwheat, thick or thin handmade noodles, includng dan dan noodle), wonton soup, congee, pastries, etc etc. And they are incredibly cheap - for a good bowl of dan dan noodles, you wouldn't pay more than $1. So when I was growing up, Szechuan food represents the best street food that you could imagine. However, for some reason, Szechuan/Chongqing food suddenly rises up to restaurant level in Vancouver and you are expected to pay 10 times more than what it's worth. In Szechuan, people get up early, have a nice and cheap street breakfast, and get on with their slow-paced and low-key life. It has lost its authenticity and simplicity to its nature, when taken out of the original environment.

Overall, I would rate Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant decent. Worth a second try. Aside from Lin's Chinese Cuisine and Peaceful restaurant, Crystal mall is the place to go to if you are a hardcore Mandarin food lover. There are several inexpensive, friendly mandarin restaurants next to the mall that offer authentic dishes.

Dimitriou's Jazz Alley (Seattle)

No combination is better than gourmet cuisine and music. I've always fantasized having a great meal, whilst listening to live music. In reality, unfortunately, just as a combo of a fancy restaurant and a nice view does not quite add up to quality food (Fraiche being one of a few exceptions), music bars tend to have just mediocre food with good or bad music. I've been to several restaurants with live music, such as The Cellar (a Jazz bar), Kino Cafe (flamenco shows) and Chai-East is East (Middle Eastern music performances), none of them serves food that exceeds my expectations.

I spent last Saturday night at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley, a renowned Jazz bar in downtown Seattle, hoping to experience something different from the ones that I've been to in Vancouver. It falls into the cliche music bar category - ordinary yet extremely overpriced Pacific Northwest seafood. As I stepped into the restaurant, its reputation spoke for itself - two-storey restaurants completely packed with people, at least 100 diners according to my estimation. Without a reservation a week ahead of time, I doubt you'd be able to find vacancy on a weekend like this.

After seated, my server, a lovely lady, showed up immediately with a wine menu and a dinner menu. I ordered a glass of Italian Pinot grigio to start off my meal, followed by Steamed Manila Clams with pancetta and leek as my appetizer and that night's special crab ravioli as my main.
The band presenting that night was Stanley Clarke band featuring Hiromi, an amazing female Japanese pianist.

Dishes came to my table fairly quickly, and the time gap in between two courses was just the right amount - long enough for savouring my last bite, yet not too long to bore off my appetite. Steamed clams were nice but not great, and the ravioli was nothing out of brilliance, even a bit too salty for my liking. What upset me was the portion and the price - three pieces of ravioli cost big, fat 30 dollars. For that price, they certainly did not taste like something worth $30. I passed on dessert and ordered another glass of local Syrah.

To my delight, both wines tasted deliciously, especially the Pinot Grigio, which partnered perfectly with clams. And glasses were filled 3/4 full ! Service was friendly and adequate. Music was fantastic, one of the best Jazz performances I've ever seen. Overall, everything about the restaurant was great except for their food.

That being said, I find it unfair to apply the same criteria of judgement to live music restaurants and regular restaurants, as people go there for the music, not solely for the cuisine. I guess it could be a good thing to have lower quality of the food, so not to steal the thunder from the show. The most economical way is to have dinner somewhere else and just order drinks during the show.

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.

refuel

Welcome to Vancouver. The city of the ripoff restaurant. This blog is dedicated to exploring the burgeoning industry of ripoff restaurants in my home city, Vancouver, where it's easier to spend $120 on a meal for two than it is to find a parking spot. A new restaurant with $20 mains turns up every week, it seems, eagerly catering to the whims of a booming Vancouver bourgeoisie frantic to spend their money as conspicuously and wastefully as possible, regardless of the quality of the food. In its eagerness to become world class, Vancouver seems to have forgotten that a price tag has to be earned. In the last few years, I've been disappointed - nay - revolted and livid more times than I can recall having been pleased by a premium dining experience. Fraiche is about the only place that I have been that is worth every penny. This is my place to vent about having been ripped off by all the fetid high-brow gastronomic cess pools that litter this city. You stole an hour of my life and raped my eyes with your hipster decor - for what? For a pretentious $10 cracker and $8 cocktail that tastes like Sunny Delight? This place is dedicated to you, Bao Bei, and to all of your ilk.

Enter refuel (http://www.refuelrestaurant.com/), a promising sounding little spot on 4th Avenue next door to Maenam's, a fusion Thai place whose mediocre overpriced morsels set the tone quite nicely for its neighbor. The evening started out well enough. Spare but tasteful interior, snappy service, drinks and openers arrived within about 5 minutes. Australian Cabernet Sauvignon was good, but the glass was only 1/4 full.

My partner, who will be adding her review after me, ordered a dish of foie gras croquettes, which turned out to be three tiny little things that were quite unusual and tasty and worth trying for the novelty, if greasy and pricey. My opener of sauteed nettles, radish, chili turned out to be bland and prosaic, a more palatable version of Kale, minus the excitement. After that snappy opening it was a good fifteen minutes until a simple opener of sliced sausage and bread found its way to my plate. The wild leek risotto on my partner's side of the table taunted me with its greenness. I wound up eating half of it. By far the best dish of the evening. Twenty minutes after those plates were cleared were still twiddling our thumbs. After being forced to run out to feed the meter, I was stunned to find the food still not there. When it arrived, my sloping hill pork was small and surrounded by a forest of the same greens I'd had as an opener - bland and tasteless. The pork was hard and tasteless and small and half fat. My partner's buttermilk fried polderside chicken was a heart attack-inducing mound of batter fit for KFC, but at KFC you at least would have gotten a nice bucket to go with it. $20 for three pieces of chicken that could hardly be found under a buttery armament of deep-fried skin?

Vancouver has indeed learned the recipe for success. Create an upscale image and you can serve tasteless slop for $20 and the customers will come rolling in. There are definitely good restaurants and chefs out there, but the majority I've visited leave me feeling ripped off. Very rarely does the cuisine justify the price tag, and refuel is a worthy opener to our odyssey of disappointment and hubris.