When it comes to pulled-pork sandwiches, I confess to being a snob. I once had a tender shoulder butt straight out of the smoker and freshly shredded just for me by Canadian barbecue champion Rockin' Ronnie Shewchuk. So I'm not kidding when I tell you that the pulled-pork sandwich I gobbled down at Crave is well worth the drive to Main Street.
There are many other delectable reasons for visiting this new casual neighbourhood restaurant, owned and operated by Wayne Martin, former executive chef at Vancouver's Four Seasons Hotel.
But Crave's silky pork sandwich -- the meat is smoked over hickory hardwood for 12 hours by Windsor Meats, tossed in house-made chipotle barbecue sauce, piled high on dense potato-scallion bread from Mix the Bakery and topped with crunchy coleslaw -- is lip-smacking good. Served with salad or thick, fresh-cut fries (sprinkled with a lemon-dill salt mix), it's also a bargain at only $10.
After 15 years with the Four Seasons, Martin finally had enough of corporate life. When this intimate 34-seat restaurant (formerly Clews) came available, he declined a lucrative job offer in Florida and decided to go into business for himself. For his sous chef, Martin scooped Scarlet Gaffney from the Fairmont Waterfront hotel and formerly the Four Seasons. And he hired Gisèle Olivier away from Stella's Tap & Tapas Bar as manager. The new team moved in on April 1 and rebranded the restaurant earlier this month.
Word of Crave's honest-to-goodness comfort food -- prepared with fresh organic ingredients and thankfully spared of any nouvelle-fusion fuss -- is obviously spreading fast. When we arrived on Tuesday night, the place was almost packed (the restaurant is also open for lunch and brunch, but doesn't take reservations).
We were able to nab one of two tables on the tiny front patio that extends off the dining room with a retractable garage-door window cranked wide open. The restaurant also has a homey back patio, trimmed with young green shrubbery and Christmas lights strung overtop. The garden will be quite quaint when the clematis and passion-flower vines start crawling up the trellises.
The restaurant interior -- cherry-wood tables and chartreuse walls -- isn't going to win any design awards. And the poorly framed hodgepodge of artwork looks like a collection scrounged from a garage sale. Ah, who cares? Let the hipsters eat at Habit down the road. The food here is so much better.
You won't find anything too fancy on the menu. And if you don't get there early, a number of items might not be available. By 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the restaurant had already sold out of its ahi-tuna tempura roll, chipotle barbecue baby-back ribs and short-rib shepherd's pie.
The buttermilk-fried chicken Cobb salad ($11) took 25 minutes to arrive. Did we complain? No way. We were too busy wolfing down every creamy, ranch-smothered bite of blue cheese, aged cheddar, bacon, roasted corn, avocado, egg and sun-dried tomatoes. If they put the crunchy fried chicken on the menu as a separate item, I'd go back just for that.
The fresh-from-the-ocean Dungeness crab cake ($12) was also coated in nice crisp batter. But the salmon burger ($11.50) could easily have done without a splash of ouzo in the soy-wasabi glaze. The sketchy flavour combination just didn't work for me, and seemed to contradict the rest of the menu's keep-it-simple philosophy which is serving this new restaurant so well.
Crave might actually be doing too well, too fast. The pacing of our meal was off (after waiting so long for the salad, the crab cake arrived at the same time as our mains).
In addition to the disappearing entrées, the restaurant was completely sold out of dessert. Our bottle of red wine was bath-water warm. We weren't offered water. And the waitress seemed to be in an awful hurry to get us out of there.
Right now, you're probably thinking: "Why is she even recommending this place?" Because I'm confident that service and stocking will improve. Martin is, after all, an extremely well-trained professional. And in the end, a good meal comes down to the food. If you're longing for casual classics at decent prices, Crave will scratch the itch.
Crave is at 3941 Main St., 604-872-3663.
Alexandra Gill