On Monday the temperature in Vancouver didn’t get much above freezing. A warm front came in overnight, and the Great White North turned into the Great Wet North on Tuesday. The rain held off until just before we returned to the hotel from Granville Island. Julian took a nap while I worked on the previous post. Once he regained consciousness, it was time to deliberate on dinner.
Granted, the fate of the free world does not depend on where we eat when we’re on the road; however, a bad meal can result in two grumpy humans in one hotel room. Never a good thing. So we look for guidance. First Julian looked at yelp, and was bamboozled by inclusion of a food truck and Tim Horton’s. He realized that he was looking at the US version of yelp. Once he switched to the Canadian version of yelp, we had better options. We settled on a Canadian locavore restaurant called Forage, about five blocks from the hotel.
The ambiance of Forage can best be described as tragically hip. The lighting was as dark as shown in the photos below. Instead of the hockey game, the TV’s above the bar were showing the dreaded fireplace video. The music playing was club, not Christmas carols. We were seated in an alcove that had wall covering reminiscent of the Hudson Bay Company blanket, except without red stripes. The decorations consisted of small juniper plants weighted down by a single red sphere decoration à la “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
The alcove in Forage.
“It just needs a little love, Charlie Brown.”
Our meal was excellent. We started with two salads, beet-heirloom tomato and kale-caramelized apple. We moved on to roast duck with duck liver-stuffed profiteroles (mini cream puffs) and pasta roulades filled with shredded duck. We opted for desserts instead of a second entrée. Julian had a cheese-filled puff with lemon verbena sauce and gin-soaked blueberries, while I went for chocolate. We asked our server about the similarities between Forage and the now-defunct Rain City Grill, which also served a locavore menu. According to him, Rain City only closed a few months ago and many of the refugees from that restaurant wound up at Forage.
Another tragically hip feature of Forage is the “Meat Raffle”. Patrons put their names on business cards for a drawing of a small piece of meat with a recipe from the chef to cook it. Nobody asked us to fill out cards; just as well, since the Customs agents enjoy getting raw meat that can’t be taken over the border. Speaking of which, Wednesday is travel home day. With luck, we’ll miss the traffic jams at the Boeing shift change in Everett and the ever-popular I-405 crawl.
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