Bis Moreno
1355 Hornby St., Vancouver; 604-669-2812. Open for dinner Monday to Saturday. A five-course menu for two, with flights of matching wines, tax and tip is approximately $300.
It takes guts to open an Italian restaurant across the street from Umberto Menghi's Il Giardino, on a quiet one-way street in Vancouver, at the same address where so many dining rooms have gone to die. Guts or foolishness, you might snootily wonder, after discovering that the owners are newly arrived from Prince George.
Prince George! What could they know about fine Italian cuisine in that northern outpost? A lot, if you're Moreno and Cinzia Miotto, the couple behind that city's highly acclaimed Da Moreno Ristorante Italiano (featured in the Where to Eat in Canada Guide for the past eight years) and the more casual CIMO Mediterranean Grill.
The Miottos still own their Prince George properties, but a more ambitious restaurant required critical mass, so the couple decided to pack up the homestead and head south. They opened Bis Moreno to quiet fanfare last month. But as word of this gastronomic wonder spreads, it promises to turn the curse of its Hornby Street address around and become one of Vancouver's finest new destination restaurants. And that's no exaggeration.
In a city obsessed with tasting menus, Bis Moreno does for Italian cooking what Rob Feenie's Lumiere first did for French cuisine and what Rob Clark's C Restaurant has done for seafood. Under Moreno Miotto's expert hand, the restaurant offers three basic menus that change frequently: a seven-course pasta menu ($45); a five-course featuring salad, pasta, fish, meat and dessert ($55); or the pièce de résistance, an eight-course chef's menu ($80). Choose from an extensive list of Italian and B.C. wines, including many hard-to-find boutique labels, or request a matching flight for the very reasonable price of $45 to $80 a person.
Patrons are free to mix and match, and vegetarian options are available. You are encouraged to simply name the number of courses you want and allow the chef to create a special menu, inspired by the freshest ingredients available.
One bite of the complimentary amuse bouche -- a single mouth-watering morsel of handmade ravioli stuffed with hazelnut on a zesty pear confit -- and we submit to the waiter's suggestion of two five-course dinners, one from sea and one from land.
My seafood menu begins with a Napoleon of potato and Digby Sea Scallop with baby leek jus. The flavours are crisp and clean. But it becomes clear that sharing will be in order when my companion is presented with a generous portion of barely seared foie gras, nestled on a finely slivered bed of sweet pear and topped with crunchy pancetta. If this isn't the most sublime combination of flavours to ever grace this sinful dish, I will give up my first-born. (To fully appreciate the silky texture and salty bite, your companion's glass of sweet amber Maculan Moscato must be shared as well.)
We carry on with lobster medallions (drizzled with premium extra virgin olive oil) and do-it-yourself steak tartar a big-hearted patty of Nicola Valley beef, with a raw egg swimming on top and a side palette of salt, pepper, scallions, capers and toast points.
Our only request was lasagna, which didn't appear on the menu, but comes with rave reviews. Forget everything you know about that meat-and-mozzarella monstrosity most restaurants try to pass off. This is the authentic Genovese article: a millefeuille of silky thin pasta layered with the snappiest pesto imaginable.
Just when we think it's impossible to follow up with anything better, up comes ever-so-lightly fried New Zealand scampi and more of that divine foie gras, combined with quail, stuffed in agnolotti and served with a goose jus reduction.
After such delicacies, it seems unfair to complain about our final courses. But we will. The prosciutto-wrapped halibut, served in a tomato and porcini mushroom salsa, would have been lovely if it weren't overcooked. The lobster tail was unfortunately drowned in honey-mustard sauce, a sickly sweet perversion of the classic thermidor.
We certainly didn't hold a grudge, especially after dessert arrived: a trio of sorbettos (canteloupe, cassis and marscapone) and a decadent little bomb of dark chocolate soufflé with a glass of local blueberry dessert wine.
A meal like this takes a full evening. We wish we could have lingered even longer in this elegant little room, so simply understated there aren't even any prints on the dark blue, brown and white walls. Eschewing the ubiquitous trattoria and the open-kitchen concept now synonymous with Italian dining across the country, Bis Moreno puts the clatter back in the closed kitchen where it belongs. Now, if they could only do something about the patio -- an obvious afterthought of a few tables simply plopped down in the middle of a drab apartment courtyard. A few planters would help immensely.
But the service was impeccable; in fact it seemed as if we had the entire fleet of dashing dark-suited waiters serving us at one time or another. That said, for the first two hours we were the only customers in the house.
It might take time for Bis Moreno to gain the audience it deserves. But guts aren't really a question when the food is this superb. Perhaps it is only fitting that the Miottos have set up shop kitty-corner to Il Giardino's time-honoured little yellow house. Because if it was Umberto Menghi who first introduced Vancouver to the concept of fine dining and weaned its culinary masses off meatballs and iceberg lettuce, it is the Miottos who are now taking Italian cuisine to the next level.
Alexandra Gill