Vancouver, CDA Food and Restaurants 2017
Announcing Our 2017 Restaurant Awards Winners!
After 12 months of dining out, the results are in! Our judges tell you the dishes, the rooms and the chefs you need to visit this year.
May 6, 2017
By Vancouver Magazine
- 2.4k
It’s finally here! Our 2017 Restaurant Awards celebrate the hottest new rooms, the top chefs and most creative menus in the city. Plus, the coveted title of Restaurant of the Year. Hope you’re hungry.
Best Brunch
Vancouverites are nuts for brunch, a fact celebrated by this new category. We won’t cross the street to see George Clooney save a child from a speeding bus, but for Café Medina’s legendary tagine—we’re happy as a clam to stand in the rain for an hour. Ditto dishes like silver winner Burdock and Co.’s crispy fried chicken or Au Comptoir’s (Bronze) authentic omelette aux fines herbes.
★★★
Café Medina
780 Richards St.
★★
Burdock and Co.
2702 Main St.
Best Izakaya
Kingyo bounces back to its previous Gold status after last year’s Silver (for Casual Japanese), thanks to the perennial excellence of dishes like its stone-grilled beef tongue. “It introduced izakaya in an elevated setting that hadn’t been seen in Vancouver before,” says one judge. “The subtle nuances in their dishes took izakaya from cheap and cheerful to elegant and refined.” Guu (Silver) has always impressed our judges with inventive dishes like deep-fried chicken knee cartilage, and Rajio’s heavenly skewers and hot stone crab bibimbap are only a few of the many dishes that have earned this hip pub a Bronze.
★★★
Kingyo
871 Denman St.
★★
Guu
Multiple locations
Best Sushi
We have such a high concentration of exceptional, multifaceted Japanese restaurants, we thought it was time to break the genre down to its component parts. But it turns out, for the most part, our judges think the Best Japanese restaurants are also the Best Sushi spots: with the now-dominant Zest taking Gold in both categories for its elegantly classical approach, and Fraser Street’s small and zoned-in Masayoshi nabbing both Silver medals. The Bronze goes to Davie’s tiny (10 seats) sushi-only Bar Maumi.
★★★
Zest
2775 W 16th Ave.
★★
Masayoshi
4376 Fraser St.
Best Vegan/Vegetarian
This new category taps into one of the big trends grabbing the city right now. The winner is scant surprise: since it opened in 2012, Shira Blustein’s The Acorn has not only defined the category in Vancouver, but also across the entire country. And a city of hungry vegetarians and non-vegetarians agree—a line snakes out of this spot almost every night of the week. More surprising is the Silver medal winner—but Richmond’s Spicy Vegetarian Cuisineunderscores the fact that our Chinese restaurants nailed no-meat cooking long before it became fashionable. Bronze goes to Victoria Drive’s Chau Veggie Express, which is bringing them in in droves with its Vietnamese take on (mostly) vegan cuisine.
★★★
The Acorn
3995 Main St.
★★
Spicy Vegetarian Cuisine
4200 No. 3 Rd.,
Richmond
Best Bakery
Notwithstanding this is a new category, it’s a familiar face that topped our judges’ ballots. Whether we call it best pastry chef or best bakery, Thomas Haas, he of the double-baked almond croissants, quark danish and sparkle cookies, remains on the top of the bread basket for all things leavened. Grabbing the Silver is Fraser Street’s paean to a classic boulangerie, Batard, while Bronze goes to the exquisite chocolates and viennoiserie of Burnaby’s Chez Christophe.
★★★
Thomas Haas
2539 W Broadway
★★
Batard
3958 Fraser St.
★
Chez Christophe
4717 Hastings St., Burnaby
Honourable Mentions
Best Pacific Northwest
In its second year, Royal Dinette earns top marks from our judges as “a place of real, quiet creativity.” Chef Jack Chen (now relocated to L’Abattoir) cooks with a “true sense of fun and purpose, articulating local ingredients with confident clarity.” Lunch and dinner services “successfully balance the tricky tightrope between more mainstream midday diners and adventurous foodies in the evening.” At Farmer’s Apprentice (Silver), David Gunawan has “taken a reductive path” with his dishes, “delving into ingredients with more depth and honesty and stripping them away to express the core of their true flavours.” Chef Andrea Carlson “cooks good food with honesty and integrity” at Burdock and Co. (Bronze), creating “comforting dishes that are rooted in the classics with flavours that are luscious, rounded and balanced.”
★★★
905 Dunsmuir St.
royaldinette.ca
★★
Farmer’s Apprentice
1535 W 6th Ave.
Best New Design
The judges were unanimous in their love for gold winner Kissa Tanto. This 80-seat Japanese-Italian restaurant, designed by Ste. Marie Art and Design, is atmospheric perfection: a glossy domed ceiling pearls with light; pink vinyl banquettes invite tête-à-têtes; and modernist tilework is inspired by the cover of a Haruki Murakami novel. READ MORE ???
★★★
Kissa Tanto
263 E Pender St.
★★
Savio Volpe
615 Kingsway
Honourable Mentions
Blue Water Café
Best Seafood
Two things are true: for an oceanfront city, Vancouver doesn’t have nearly enough seafood restaurants…but the ones we do have are amazing. To wit, Blue Water Cafe, which has owned this category since 2008, again tops the judges’ ballots for its blend of consistency and creativity, typified by chef Frank Pabst’s continual pushing of the seafood boundaries with his use of limpets and jellyfish. But hot on its heels is Silver winner Ancora, led by chef Ricardo Valverde, who blends his native Peruvian cuisine and Japanese influences with local B.C. ingredients to great effect. Taking Bronze is the elegant Boulevard, with its ever-present seafood towers and oysters galore.
★★★
Blue Water Cafe
1095 Hamilton St.
★★
Ancora
1600 Howe St.
Best Food Truck
Not that long ago we were expecting food trucks on every block, but the realities of licensing, maintenance and having to make hay, mostly at lunch, mean that our three winners are the forebears of the business and all have bricks-and-mortar establishments to help defray the costs of the truck. Taking gold is our paragon of trucks—the born-in-Tofino legend that is Tacofino, where their take on fish tacos continues to set the standard. Close behind is Le Tigre, with its Chinese and West Coast mash-up typified by the legendary crack salad which hasn’t slipped despite their growth into a restaurant (Torafuku). Bronze is Vij’s Railway Express, where the high prices are offset by attention to detail and high-end ingredients uncommon on four wheels.
★★★
Tacofino
★★
Le Tigre
Best Whistler
The mountain version of the Hatfields and the McCoys is again the theme of this year’s Whistler category, with Araxi (winner of the award every time but once since 2000) and Bearfoot Bistro (the “but once”) presenting their different takes on high-alpine fine dining. Gold is Araxi: its supreme consistency and flawless presentation continue to impress our judges. But there’s also love for the controlled excess of silver winner Bearfoot, where the steady hand of chef Melissa Craig keeps the high-wire operation in check. Bronze was snagged by newcomer (and Top Table stablemate to Araxi) Bar Oso, where authentic Spanish tapas, a vibe-y room and a much lower price point than the other medallists make it the hardest table to get right now.
★★★
Araxi
110-4222 Village Square
Best Victoria
It’s a wholesale changing of the guards in Victoria as an entire new slate of young’uns captures the podium this year. First up is the tiny Agrius, where Cliff Leir presides over a jewel box of a room. In the words of one judge: “A young, unpretentious, ingredients-focused team sources local and focuses on flavourful, and is also home to the best bakery in the capital city (oh, the breads). Cocktails are sharp, and the wine list is naturalist; this is the hippest room in town.” Silver goes to Part and Parcel, an ultra-low-key, supremely wallet-friendly Quadra Street spot that also zones in on the local, while bronze sees the Island’s reigning whole- food champ Nourish show its leafy chops.
★★★
Agrius
732 Yates St.