Market Cafe makes a casual, but equally satisfying, alternative to its plusher cohort
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Shangri-La Hotel executive chef David Foot in front of fireplace in the Market Cafe at the Shangri-La hotel complex. Photograph by: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
MARKET CAFE
1115 Alberni St., 604-695-1115
Open for lunch and dinner daily.
Overall: ****
Food: ****
Ambience: ****
Service: *****
Price: $/$$
Sun Restaurant Critic. [email protected]. Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Restaurants are rated out of five stars.
– – –
Be it blizzard, biblical rain or scorched earth, if you’re trapped in a building and it happens to be the Shangri-La hotel complex on West Georgia, how fortunate. If you like to eat, you’ll have a ball.
At street level, there’s the posh Urban Fare gourmet grocery store with cafeteria hot and cold offerings and a chocolate boutique and Ki, an Asian fusian restaurant is under construction.
In the hotel area, there’s the hotel’s Lobby Lounge (basic meals) but when you ascend to the next level (in more ways than one), you’re on Jean-Georges Vongerichten turf.
There’s his Market Bar with snacky foods and a raw bar (and where I recently spotted former city councillor Jim Green). The main dining room, Market by Jean-Georges, will induce instant amnesia even to an Armageddon outside. The food and service will do that.
Now if you take a wrong turn, you end up at Market Cafe, a casual take on Vongerichten food. The under-publicized cafe is over-shadowed by the hugely popular Market dining room. The cafe lacks the plushness of the dining room but the service is as polished as next door and the wine list is the same. Sommelier Robert Stelmachuk makes detours from the dining room, brining his big personality and even bigger knowledge of wine with him.
The menu is more pizza and burgers with some highlights from the appetizer menu in the dining room and if you’re downtown, it’s a chic spot for a casual lunch or dinner. The most expensive dishes are $14. Except for a couple of niggling details, the quality is top notch both in ingredients and cookery.
Let’s start with the thin-crust pizzas. I tried a hit and a miss in that category. Well, perhaps not entirely a miss. The tuna carpaccio and wasabi cream topping was actually gorgeous with a poof of julienned daikon and shiso but I think it would have been better on its own without the pizza crust (although my partner liked it just as it was). The tuna is too soft and delicate against the crust for me.
The black truffle and fontina cheese pizza, however, redeemed this category. So-o good, so redolent with black truffle. My partner ordered it and my excuses to try more degenerated from lame to pathetic.
One evening, a little boy sitting at the next table ordered the cream tomato soup to go with his burger. He looked alarmed when an empty white bowl with a crostini shard across the top was delivered to him. He was visibly relieved not to have to deal with a problem when a second server slid in and poured the soup from another receptacle.
The beef burger comes with two sirloin patties. “They cook quicker and lose less moisture than a single thick patty,” explains restaurant chef David Foot. The perfect fries came with three dips. Foot is proud of the tuna burger with the premium ahi, mixed with shallots and brushed with sesame oil and soy sauce. It’s cut and chopped daily and cooked to rare, medium or well done. Typical of Vongerichten, Asian flavours creep in — bonito mayo, yuzu pickles, shiso leaves.
The beef tartar is freshly ground daily; instead of toast points, it comes with tempura-battered onions which stay crisp to the last bite. I had to ask how. “We mix a fresh batter every 45 minutes,” says Foot. “After that, the baking powder and rice flour in it breaks down.”
The cafe shares the same dessert menu as the dining room — my chance to try the pavlova I’d missed. It’s a spherical meringue jobbie with passion fruit sorbet tucked in the hollow innard. A marvel, but frankly, I would have preferred to find whipped cream and fruit inside. The sphere sat upon a shallow base of whipped cream but I sat with sad ‘more please’ eyes.
The banana cake has a picture-perfect chorus line of caramelized banana slices marching across the top and the caramel ice cream is delicious. The cake, though, could have been more delicate and banana-ey.
I’m certainly not complaining — I’m writing about a casual restaurant, for gosh sakes. And considering that, it’s excellent value.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun