Taste Buddies - A Sydney Food Blog

blue water cafe + raw bar, Vancouver

After being away from Vancouver for a year, there's one thing I miss most, apart from friends of course, and that is, the wild salmon. There's nothing like it. And while Australia has it's fair share of delicious fish, nothing quite compares to the rich, delicate flesh of wild Sockeye.

Having only a week to spend in Vancouver, I was on a mission to fulfill my fish fix. Each night and day was taken up with visits to favourite food haunts: Kirin Restaurant (three times) for world class dim sum; Legendary Noodle for cheap & cheerful hand-pulled noodles; Granville Island Public Market for, well, everything, Kintaro for amazing shio ramen and Medina for Moroccan breakfasts and Belgian waffles.

The last stop was planned for Yuji's -- offering Vancouver's best Japanese tapas, aka izakaya, and melt-in-your-mouth wild salmon sashimi. As luck would have it, Yuji's was closed for the long weekend! Alas no salmon.

I didn't give up that easily and remembered hearing about blue water cafe + raw bar in Yaletown. The highly acclaimed restaurant is famed for its west coast plates and seafood. I snuck in and asked to see the menu. There it was -- Beni sake Sockeye salmon sashimi. Three plates please. Oh and some oysters too.

Set in a converted heritage warehouse, blue water cafe + raw bar is big. The decor is eclectic, warm and inviting.  On one side of the room, the fast and furious open kitchen is exciting to behold. On the other, the dazzling raw bar is home to sashimi master Yoshi Tabo.

Vancouver Hot Spot: Granville Island

A week has past since first arriving in Sydney. I've experienced a whole range of emotions and spent a lot of time reflecting on our lives in Vancouver.

There is much that I miss but also much I look forward to in rediscovering in Oz. Although, my first grocery outing in Sydney was a slap in the face after discovering  the cost of organic and bio-dynamic food -- a small punnet of strawberries costs $10; a head of lettuce, $5, and green beans, $39 a kilogram! Mind you, I was browsing next to a Baby Dior boutique so perhaps I was in the wrong neighbourhood. That being said, Australia seems as long way behind Canada in terms of organic produce. I need to start growing my own.

Our lives revolve largely around food and the purchasing of it is just as much as much fun as the preparation of it. This is why one of the things I miss most is Vancouver's Granville Island Public Market -- a cornucopia of culinary offerings. Over 50 merchants selling anything from fresh-of-the-boat wild salmon to hundreds of pungent cheeses. There are endless displays of bursting berries, plump vegetables, freshly baked breads and pastas.

Kirin Restaurant: a different dim sum experience

Dim Sum is an experience. It’s about as close as we get to hunting in our urbanized environment. There’s nothing like the satisfaction I feel when I finally catch that elusive dumpling that kept whirring by on the trolley, always just out of reach. It is for this reason that I have found that going out for a Dim Sum lunch can often be a stressful affair.

At Kirin Restaurant in Vancouver, the most stress you are likely to encounter is at the moment you try to decide which steaming morsel to eat first.

A Christmas Morning Feast

This year we decided to forgo cooking a large and time-consuming Christmas lunch. Instead, we headed to Kirin Restaurant for a dizzying ten course Chinese banquet but more on that next time.

To tide us over until the lunchtime feast, we opted for a light Christmas breakfast of freshly baked mini croissants served with either raspberry jam or smoked salmon and crème fraiche and a platter of fresh fruit.

Now let me tell you about the croissants. They were incredible...impossibly light, flaky and organic! We bought twenty of the little dough crescents from Vancouver Croissant. Actually, we had intended to buy them but the kind manager, Maged Sedky, wouldn't hear of it and, even though we'd never met before, he gave them to us free as a Christmas present!

Cupcakes

I like simple things. Pretty things. Like Cupcakes.

I like a shop who knows who it is. I like a shop with a simple message. Cupcakes.

Cupcakes is a store that doesn't bite off more than it can chew; who knows on which side its bread is buttered and who knows every side of its buttery bread.

The original Cupcakes is situated in the West End of Vancouver's down town. It only does one thing. But that one thing is done very well!

My favourite is the 'Koo Koo' - a plain vanilla cupcake with delicious, creamy, cream cheese icing and desiccated coconut sprinkled on top.

While the 'Koo Koo' is a very special cupcake there are others which I hold close to my heart such as the 'Lemon Drop'; a lemon cake with lemon butter cream. Then there's the 'Blue Hawaii'; a coconut cake with a blue vanilla butter cream, sprinkled with fresh coconut.

A beautiful shop, doing its thing to keep kids of all ages smiling. You can have a taste of Cupcakes' expanding empire, now at three locations: West End; West Broadway; and North Vancouver.

What's in a name? Legendary Noodle

I've always had an abiding suspicion of cafes and restaurants who claim to have 'the best cup off coffee in the city' or the 'best pizza slice in town'. Experience has shown these claims to be pretty hit and miss. More miss than hit, really. Often the insult of anticlimax being added to the injury of a mediocre cup of coffee.

So it was with a due skepticism that we entered Legendary Noodle: a small noodlery on Main St, Vancouver, known for its made-on-the-spot fresh noodles. Customers can watch as their noodles are stretched, slapped and cooked right before their eyes.

Since that first visit, we have been back several times. The fresh noodles and dumplings are consistently good; the menu is simple, but with a good mix of meat and vegetarian options; and the novelty of the deft hands manipulating noodles out of dough continues to excite.

This time, we ordered the ground beef and chinese mushroom noodles and a dumpling noodle soup. They were good, complimentary choices. The ground beef and chinese mushroom gravy was rich and salty. The soup was very mild. We asked for a couple of small personal bowls and mixed them to good effect.

The really legendary part is that this all came to $11.00.

This small, family operation is not going to blow you away with innovation, flavour or creativity, but the food is consistent and fresh, the service is quick and the servings are large.

Legendary Noodle is located at 4191 Main Street, Vancouver (Tel: 604-879-8758). A second restaurant has opened in the West End and is located at 1074 Denman Street, Vancouver (Tel:604-669-8551).

South China Seas Trading Company

Vancouver has a diverse Asian palate and a testament to this is the South China Seas Trading Company store at Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver.

The store however does not limit itself to just Asian foodstuffs. It also stocks hard to find items from the Caribbean, Mexico, India, South Africa and Japan and a variety of fresh seasonal produce like morels, sea asparagus and tamarind, just to name a few.

I shop here at least once a week and am always enthralled by all the interesting items they have in stock.

The most unusual ingredient I have seen there is Krachai Root, a Rhizhome also known as Fingerroot or Chinese Ginger. Krachai Root is used in a Thai Dish called 'Kanom Jin Naam Ya', which I can only describe as a type of minced fish curry with rice noodles and various condiments. The Krachai Root gives the dish a slightly medicinal sort of flavour. It is really hard to explain what it tastes like but it is very distinctive and delicious.

South China Seas also has a great collection of international cookbooks.