Feenie's
2563 West Broadway, Vancouver. 604-739-7115. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $75.
In the recurring nightmare of the restaurant critic, I am reviewing an endless loop of mid-priced restaurants. It isn't pretty. Some suffer a ubiquity so ferocious that I can carry a menu from one to another and order from it with utter confidence: lack of ram, blackened group, recent veal, tonight sauced with low morels.
Across Europe and North America, haute cuisine is slowly dying. With business and holiday travel (which drive high-end restaurant revenues) off more than 15 per cent since 2001, many restaurant operators see a more casual format as the difference between swimming upstream or drowning.
For the most part, this means fewer imperious headwaiters, stuffy rooms and absurdly overpriced wine. In New York, Daniel Boulud's downstream room, DB Bistro Moderne, is now a tougher reservation than his signature haute box, Restaurant Daniel. In Toronto, the Oliver and Bonacini Group (Canoe, Auberge Pommier, Biff's) opened the casual Oliver Bonacini, extending their brand into the Bayview Village mall. And in Vancouver, the downtown power lunch room Chartwell is now closed at lunch time. Two more fine dining rooms, Pastis and West, recently spent big money to redecorate and reformat their menus more casually, while across town, one of Canada's foremost chefs has begun serving hot dogs.
That's right, hot dogs. Right next door to Rob Feenie's vaunted Lumière (on any given night one of the country's finest restaurants), where culinary tourists gladly eat from his often brilliant $100-plus tasting menus, the chef, cookbook author, Food Network Canada star and member of the prestigious Relais Gourmands is dishing up hot dogs at his brand new, sleekly designed Canadian brasserie.
Last year, on more than a hunch, Feenie opened a small "tasting bar" next to his main restaurant. Offering "12 things for $12" in an attractive setting, it has been packed since it opened, serving potent turns of braised short ribs, signature handmade raviolis and some of the best drinks in the town. It's fun, without complication or pretension, and describes exactly how consumers want to eat. But it is small, and the kitchen it shares with Lumière even smaller. When the next door café-bakery went under, Feenie and designer David Hepworth jumped on the space.
The result is Feenie's, a series of rooms, styled but intimate, where both men and women feel comfortable. And so, apparently, do their children. Off the entrance, a long red bar fronts a room-length banquette (there are even a couple of flat-screen TVs awaiting the start of the hockey season); a private dining room stands behind disappearing doors; and a patio faces onto busy West Broadway, adjoining the main restaurant space. It is dominated by a wall upholstered with lozenge-shaped pillows in the shades of a ripening peach. Above, a yellow fabric chandelier looks like a hairy flying saucer.
The food is hardly alien though, with a steady bead on Quebec (for duck, cheeses, microgreens) and British Columbia (for everything else).
Ingredient-driven, Feenie's (and talented sous chef Darren Bergeron's) version of simple Canadian cooking is complex. This is food with its feet on the ground and sometimes in it.
In some dishes, such as their version of shepherd's pie, the result makes the simple stunning. Ground lamb is replaced with duck confit, the potatoes are whipped with truffles, and a silky duxelle of earthy mushrooms joins a layer of fresh corn. It's served in white, rectangular casseroles and is delicious, unpretentious kitchen food. We found more cleanly wrought flavours on a board of excellent charcuterie, including duck prosciutto, bunderfleisch, pork cheeks and Lonza pork loin. Each is the local product of the extraordinary Oyama Sausage Company on Granville Island and it may be just be the most civilized kind of bar food going, which at Feenie's accompanies cocktails, ice-cold draft beers and ales, and a smartly balanced wine list.
Soup is the restaurant critic's friend. It chimes if the kitchen is paying attention, clanks if it's an afterthought or is simply cream of cream. Not here. A bowl of duck soup, where a perfectly clear, perfectly seasoned broth is larded with duck and herbed wontons, begged only for colder weather. So, too, the onion soup under a lid of gratin, and a generous bowl of chicken noodle, with a sliced breast and out-sized garlic crouton afloat in more superb broth. They're enough alone to look forward to the hockey season.
In this kind of cooking, there's nowhere to hide. Either the food is cleanly and keenly flavoured or you're going to go away mad. Braised beef short ribs, served with sautéed bok choy and edamame, were unctuous yet light, the rich flesh ticked up by a ginger and lime reduction.
Accompanying chef Bergeron's take on poutine, served in a properly beefy gravy, were properly Québécois cheese curds. A roasted free-range chicken, with sautéed mushrooms, caramelized pearl onions and a light riesling sauce, was also convincing. We finished with a selection of ice creams and sorbets, and a fine peach and blueberry crumble, each tasting like summer.
But wait, there's less. The hot dog, billed as "Feenie's Weenie," sells for $8. It's a local smoky of admirable length and girth and is served with gentle sauerkraut in a very good bun, with a selection of condiments including Heinz ketchup and homemade sweet relish. In the entire genre of hot dogs, about which I know quite a bit, I would judge it to be a superior contribution, as well as an exciting antidote to the nightmares of the restaurant critic, the loneliest profession in the world.