Best Damn Food Blog

I’m cold all the damn time. I can’t help it; something to do with being tropical born (concrete jungle, ya know) and having a lazy heart.

That’s why each morning I wake up in the spring, besides wanting to commit sinus seppuku, I hope fervently for sunshine. I make small sacrifices to the sun gods in hope that they can hear me. (Dear Sun God(s), this morning I leave my toes aloft out-of-socks as small contribution to sunworthiness.) Alas, all hopes for short skirts and sunkissed skin are consistently dashed. (Sun God(s) deem me undeserving.)

So what’s one supposed to do?

Carb-load your way into hibernation happiness!

On the corner of Robson and Denman, across from the Safeway, hides away little Nook. It was a somewhat visible foodie secret it seems, as my gourmand friend tells me it’s great and somehow not quite on the radar.

It’s not easy to miss, but you do have to mentally GPS it into your field of vision.

Nook is cozy, and it’s not a euphemism for being small (which it is). The staff are warm and friendly, and the food is also warm and inviting.

We had an Italian Sausage Pizza with Chilies, Sweet Onions, and Roasted Garlic. The crust was chewy and the pizza was dense. The chilies were there, but only in slight emphasis.

We also shared Orechiette with Italian Sausage and Fennel.

I had ordered orechiette because who doesn’t like eating ears? Although in hindsight there may have been too much Italian sausage between both dishes, the flavor profile was still different enough that it was enjoyable together.

I was kinda hoping the ears would be chewier, though. If I had swapped levels of chewiness between the two dishes, that might have worked better for me.

All in all, carb comfort of the highest order. Italian cooking, you do me good.

Hello friends!

I was down in Portland over the long Easter weekend recently, enthused about visiting Portlandia for the second time. The first time it gave me warm fuzzies, but also wide eyes and a too-narrow stomach that did not accommodate for trying all that food carts had to offer.

I heard that Portland had a lot of food carts, but when I first arrived I was flabbergasted. I thought I had some strategy to tackle them all (just pick one thing from each cart! … right?), but apparently being overly greedy wasn’t exactly a strategy. Alright, I suppose I could be discerning.

I did my research by walking around the block once… twice… walked a few blocks over to the next crop of food carts… walked back to the first lot… then eventually I picked the loudest looking cart when I was finally hungry enough to eat a wolf, and went with it.



Euro Trash is bright and flashy, so very Euro-trashy.



The menu was intriguing. If you know anything about me, it’s (usually) go big or go home.

So at around noon, with a hangover and with the intention of eating something that was more intended to be breakfast, I asked for the Foie Gras (on top of Nah Nah Chips: potatoes, sliced + fried with garlic aioli).



Yeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Look at that.

Foie gras!

From a food truck!

On top of garlic aioli smothered fried chips!

On a sunny day!

During a hangover!



Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!

Before I could recall whether travel insurance applied to self inflicted coronary disease, I yelled out my battle cry: “I regret nothing!” and dug in.

I would hardly recommend the same thing to anyone else for any reason except to garner stupid enjoyment from all things foie gras/novel, but if somehow none of the above did not trigger some sort of nutritional self defense mechanism like making you want to eat a leafy green instead, you are the target demographic. Go for it, I say!

I recently came back from a business trip in Montreal, and my tongue felt leathery and dull after eating all the fast meals I had no choice but to participate in. When I came back, I embraced the humidity and the ubiquity of sushi joints surrounded by our majestic mountains. Oh Vancouver, how I missed you! The first thing I decided I wanted to do to cement my relationship with Vancouver as my home was to go have delicious Japanese food.

J and I went out to Hapa Izakaya in Kits recently, showing up without a reservation and happily taking the reservation of those who didn’t come in time for theirs. (15 minutes late? Fuhgeddaboudit.) We ordered the goma-ae (fresh veggies at the time were spinach and baby bok-choy), gindara (miso-sake marinated sablefish), fish and chips roll (exactly what it sounds like - halibut tempura wrapped up in a cozy roll), and the cho wagyu.

Ohhhh wagyu. If you are not in the know, wagyu is a specific type of Japanese cattle that is predisposed to a fat dispersion in their meat called marbling. You might know it better as Kobe beef since the origin of the cattle is usually in its name, but it comes from different regions in Japan as well (Thanks Wikipedia!). There is also an American equivalent but depending what type of cattle and where it is sourced, it may not be exactly wagyu; just because it’s called “Kobe beef” doesn’t mean it actually comes from Kobe. But that’s a different story.

The marbling in the meat results in an intensely buttery cut of beef that melts in your mouth. It’s not exactly steak material, however. Trust me: I’ve tried to eat a wagyu steak before, and beside the fact that you probably need to mortgage the damn thing, it’s over the top. I find that truly the most enjoyable way to eat it is in small slices, enough to savor each bite carefully.

At Hapa, they serve four creamy slices raw with a hot stone to grill it yourself, then to be paired with garlic chips, green onions, and ponzu sauce.



That’s right.



Not pictured: the learning curve required to understand that your first slice will probably be a little bit too done, and then your second piece will be a bit underdone.

In either case, it’s still delicious which way you hot-stone it.

I was looking for Japanese delivery recently and came across Ki-Isu. Unfortunately, it turned out that we were outside of delivery range (*shakes fist*), but remembered this place again when out and about looking for a tasty Japanese meal.

In their seasonal specials page of their menu are a number of very interesting items such as Dark Sweet.



According to their menu, Dark Sweet is: black brown rice, asparagus, tamago, lettuce, chopped scallop, tobiko, prawn tempura, drizzled with wasabi mayo and BBQ sauce.

Besides being one heck of a massive roll, it was really sweet, so not my kinda thing. With this mixture of ingredients (Asparagus? Two types of sauces? Black rice?) it also turned out to be rather mushy. Also not my kinda thing. It was definitely very interesting to try, though.

We ordered something else from the seasonal specials, which turned out to be the crazy delicious thing I ate recently.

On the table is the brown rice salmon cake: brown rice stacked with crunch, avocado salad, and tangy jalapeno salmon, garnished with kizami nori.





Oh man, you guys. This was wicked tasty.

The salmon and avocado were fantastically creamy and so much so that it complemented beautifully the crunch (which I assume are bits of fried tempura batter) and the chewy brown rice. The jalapeno was the real highlight here, with little bursts of spiciness permeating each buttery bite. It’s a very different experience from eating spicy salmon which is salmon in a spicy sauce, making the whole thing fairly spicy. I love the hint of Mexican of the combination of jalapenos and avocados; on top of salmon sushi, it’s a delicious winner.

My friend Anna is a genius. I’m sure I’ve told her before, but here I am on the internet, validating her genius. With her permission, I am reposting her writing here as it is a completely brills diagnosis of the psychology of McDonald’s, and possibly hits home to the psychology of the rabid enthusiasm and obsession foodies nurse into blogs.

The Id Burger
by Anna W.

I love McDonald’s and I’m not ashamed to admit it.  I know they “got me” when I was young.  I know their beef is gross.  I know that their fries have a week’s worth of salt on them.  But I can’t help it, because McDonald’s makes the most delicious food in the world.  But I would argue that it’s beyond food. It’s on a whole other plain of existence.  McDonald’s is in a category of it’s own, separate from mere mortal food.  It’s not that other food isn’t enjoyable.  Sandwiches, lasagna, green beans, fruit, even chocolate cake are all fantastically delicious.  But they are still categorized by my brain as “food.”  McDonald’s is pure pleasure.  The sooner I stop thinking of it as food, the sooner I will be able to properly frame my McD’s lustings and cravings — they do not stem from hunger, but from the deep-seated voice, the id.

Initially, I thought that my cravings were socially learned.  McDonald’s plays three important learned roles in my life: as a treat, a reward, and a rebellion.  McDonald’s was marketed to be something special, a treat.  A trip to the restaurant is supposed to be out of the ordinary, to either mark a special occasion, or “just cuz,” making the meal itself the “occasion.”  Thus, McDonald’s became exciting and desirable.  Further, in our culture, using unhealthy food as a reward is very common and very dangerous.  When you start rewarding yourself with unhealthy food, then it very quickly becomes something that you “deserve” when you’ve done a good job.  Finally, McDonalds has always been a rebellion.  Early on, in elementary school, it was a rebellious and “cool” thing to leave the school grounds at lunch to got to McDonald’s.  Now, with my wage-earning job and freedom of mobility, the act of rebellion in this form no longer holds any power.  But as I get older (and lordy lordy, as I spend more and more time with middle-aged women working as admin assistants) I hear more and more the ever-pervasive guilt-reward slogan, “Let’s be bad.”*  The rebellion is against the diet.  However, while there is some truth to the socially learned cravings of McD’s, I think the “treat,” “reward.” and “rebellion” rationalizations mask the true nature of the craving — mindless mouth pleasure.

When I eat a Big Mac, it is not meat, bread, lettuce and sauce.  It is a single unit of mouth pleasure.  It is beyond taste pleasure, it is “taste porn.”  I believe it awakens something deep within your base brain, your old brain, your animal brain.  The sight of it, the smell of it, the anticipation.  Completely without the input from your rational, conscious mind, your taste buds become aroused.  The haze sets in, you fall into the mindless drone, an animal fulfilling its deep desires.  Afterwards, when the world becomes clear again, there is no lingering satisfaction.  Often there are pangs of guilt, or actual physical pain.   But some part of you is satisfied, and that’s the part of you that will always bring you back to the counter, again and again.  I think that what we are truly experiencing is the powering down of our higher brain functions.  This is made possible by eating a burger that speaks to our id.  And after too many consciously crafted low-fat meals, the id calls again.  And it says “An id burger please.”  ”Would you like fries with that?”  ”You’re damn right I do.”

Sugar, fat and salt.  You know what I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3IgFsEEOik

 *Oh god how I hate that phrase.  Framing a meal at McDonalds with the phrase, “Let’s be bad” is dangerous.   So many different meanings can be derived from that one statement.  It means: I feel societal pressure to look and act a certain way.  It means: this pressure affects my life choices and life goals.  It means: I engage in the guilt-reward cycle. It means: I have insufficient will-power to achieve my goals.  To me, it is a public airing of weakness, a public airing of being “not good enough.”

I’ve heard a lot about porchetta sandwiches. The local food scene has been much ado about the crispy, fatty, porky sammiches, and I was late (as usual) to the scene.

I owe it to my mild OCD in loving to plan things, and I definitely planned this trip to Big Lou’s. Probably not in the way you might imagine, though.



Big Lou’s Butcher Shop is sort of in our neighborhood (actually, I don’t believe we can claim that much in our neighborhood - what the hell is “Crosstown” anyway?), on the far edge of Gastown past Main.

It is, as named, a butcher shop, but there’s also a sandwich shop divvying up freshly flamed meats into lunch servings.








It’s all nouveau-retro-old-timey in there (there may be a term for that I don’t know, I admit), and they have an old-fashioned-looking cash register on the counter which, as far as I know, is just for show.

Your sandwich comes rolled up in paper and tied with string like a pack of meat, and you can have the option of washing down your hearty meats with old-timey Boylan soda. In fact, this whole affair is rather old timey. If I had a handlebar mustache, it would definitely be bristling.



On the left is the pastrami, and on the right porchetta. The bulgogi chicken sounded per-retty tempting, but we decided to go with classics.

So I mentioned I had planned for this trip to Big Lou’s, right? By which I meant I made sure to do a week or two of cardio before meeting my sandwich. It was a good idea, but it was not nearly enough.



LOOK AT THAT FATTY PORK. LOOK AT IT. You can almost feel its greasiness ooze through the computer screen.

Holy god that first bite was phenomenal. Second bite, also phenomenal. Third bite, beginning to wonder when angina will set in. I had a bunch more bites of delicious denial (“hey, that chimichurri sauce is green, right? Vegetables!”), taking liberal bites of pure fat until I actively decided that as a somewhat high-functioning adult person I should probably hold off on slowly diminishing the years of my life.

The bread was crusty with fluffy crumb, the chimichurri sauce was flavorful and tangy enough to make a comfortable acidic pairing with the fatty pork, and the sandwich was laced with bits of crunchy pork skin. This was one hefty hulk of a sandwich. I’m fairly certain I can only eat this once in my lifetime.

Stay tuned for a future post on another porchetta sandwich from another sammich establishment!

Continuing on the presentation streak of “what there is to eat in my hood”, J and I decided to go to the Indian place we’ve walked by numerous times (downstairs from the Diamond, across from Chill Winston and Six Acres… you know that spot).

It was pretty quiet on a week night. We sat at a table next to a brick facade with a decorative display of Christmas lights and a massive sitar.

J ordered the Sitar Dinner: Lamb curry, alugobi, tandoori chicken, dal, rice pillau, naan, papad and chutney. It was somewhere around $23-25 - J’s eyes were swimming like a hungry wolf’s and growing wide as dinner plates. “This is going to be a ton of food!”

I heard sizzling on the next table over and went for the tandoori fish.



Well.. it wasn’t exactly a ton of food. It was, in fact, a somewhat manageable amount of food.



Everything was fairly alright and decently acceptable. Okay. -ish. I mean, for the price paid (I know it’s Gastown, but still) is it ludicrous to expect so much food they’d have to bring it in with a forklift? I don’t condone portion sizes the size of small countries (or ones that could feed small countries), but y’know… just sayin’. Coulda spent my dollar somewhere else.

I recently stopped by for one of the perogy nights at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about (I had written about it once long ago, but the post has since been lost to the sands of internet time).

No, after stuffing our faces with perogies and sausages and cabbage rolls, we walked over to the Rumpus Room for a drink.

On the menu were deep fried Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Yeah.



You get three in a bowl - deep fried batter with melty chocolate and peanut butter inside. Dollops of whipped cream and what seems to be craisins sprinkled on top.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I’ve been dying to tell you about this place, but hesitant at the same time. I have a soft spot for Gyo-O, and being that it’s already difficult enough to try to get a table on most nights, I’d rather not have more people to line up behind.

But I have to tell you. It’s so good.

I found this place when I was searching for a decent chirashi. Chirashi is a bit of a strange craving, because it’s essentially deconstructed sushi. Why wouldn’t I crave sushi instead? Listen… it’s different. It’s akin to the difference of craving tacos instead of burritos. Sort of.

Gyo-O is a tiny cocoon of hustle and bustle. The place isn’t large, it’s cash only, but there’s a certain harmony to the coming and going of people.




The walls are covered in Japanese, except for the huge mural on your left when you walk in.

The service is friendly and snappy, and the menu is pretty large - there are generally a lot of things I want to try when I sit down. But first… kaisen don (seafood on rice)!



For some of the rice bowls you can have them in mini size, so this was a smallish bowl perfect for me. Salmon maybe seems a tad skimpy - the difference between 2 and 3 slices is significant, for some arbitrary reason - but the portion was good for me.

Of course, I’ve been back a number of times. Oh yes. And I’ve tried a few more things on the menu.



The bukkake udon is one of their specialties. HEY! Mind out of the gutter!



The takoyaki bukkake udon is a little bit slimy overall, though. It’s topped with a sauna egg (hot spring egg?) that is like a runny white + runny yolk poached egg. It gets all over everything. Be warned, if you don’t like goopy things. The takoyaki has a lovely color and texture on the surface and the batter mix is done really well. Sometimes the tako is hit or miss, but when you get a good piece it’s a damn tasty takoyaki… and I don’t even normally like the stuff!



If you order it on its own with the sauce and everything, it’s tangy and crispy and chewy and fishy. Yum.



The above is one of the combos you can get on rice as well (a lunch special, I believe?). You can get an assortment of tempura items, chicken karaage, takoyaki… oh man. Deep fried goodness.



The tempura is done very nicely - a truly light tempura batter that doesn’t taste greasy or have too much crinkly bits of batter all over. The prawn comes with some seasoning salt for dipping.

I’ve tried a whole variety of different things on the menu and keep coming back for more delicious surprises. There are a large number of smallish dishes that are very reasonably priced and of a very decent quality, and they work at a fast pace to keep up with the revolving door of hungry customers. Worth your time to check out one time in Richmond if you want decent Japanese fast food.

Oh, and another word of advice - don’t watch the TV, because they almost always have eating competitions on and unless seeing people stuff themselves with 40+ hotdogs gets your appetite going, make sure you keep your eyes on your prize.

One of my recent favorites: Dirty Apron. The hours are reasonable, and while the deli and shop are a bit compact, it’s full of variety.

Popped in hungry one weekend afternoon to grab a sandwich. I had the roast beef, which comes snugly nestled in a delish chimichurri sauce, charred tomato salsa and watercress (according to the website… but it seemed like there may have been something like horseradish mayo in there too).




The online shop encourages corporate group lunches. If you work in the area, you should go for it!