Party-on eatery designed for ‘beginner diners’ who like to make a lot of noise
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Enjoying their appetizers at Society Dining Lounge in Yaletown are (left to right) Laura Williams, Jacki Benjamin and Golya Bordian. Photograph by: Mark Van Manen, PNG, Vancouver Sun
AT A GLANCE
Society Dining Lounge
Overall: 2 1/2
Food: ***
Ambience: ** 1/2
Service: *** 1/2
Price: ***
1257 Hamilton St.
604-629-8800.
Open Monday to Friday for lunch and seven nights a week for dinner. www.society-grg.ca
I once went with a friend to her four-year-old daughter’s violin lesson. When we arrived, violins were howling and squawking.
Her daughter lay down on the floor, tolerated the noise for a couple of seconds and then, with scrunched-up face, hands over ears, yelled: “Quit making that racket!”
That’s just what I wanted to do at Society Dining Lounge in Yaletown. The noise level was deafening, with pounding lounge music amped up and diners yelling and laughing.
It’s all fine and good when you’re 20-something and the more life seems like a rip-roaring party, the better. I am so not a 20-something. I put out the little candle on the table several times trying to read the menu by its light, and when the pretty server came by I could only marvel at how she could smile and take food orders over the ear-splitting decibels when I could barely read her lips.
“Maybe you should send text messages,” my husband shouted. His wife was not amused.
Society is the latest from the Glowbal family of restaurants (Glowbal, Coast, Sanafir, Italian Kitchen, Trattoria), a savvy, recession-proof company. So what’s with this?
Clever marketing, it seems. It’s the party-on school of restaurants for the beginner diner, a market Glowbal Group could befriend, then perhaps in time, move along to their other businesses. Or, possibly, it’s for groups who just wanna have fun. The place was filled with people much happier than me. Quieter diners had escaped to the patio, warmed with heat lamps.
Two hot-pink chandeliers drop from the ceiling in the main room like inebriated octopuses. With the dark walls, you expect Jacques Cousteau to come snorkelling around the corner. The women’s bathroom door is emblazoned with a photo of a studly male; on the men’s door, a sexy woman.
The diner-style menu, the cacophony and hyperactivity, the cotton candy (part of the “Junk Food” dessert platter with a cupcake, doughnut holes, ice cream sandwich, Oreo milkshake, cookies and caramel corn) and the devil-may-care attitude to calories can only resonate with kids who haven’t seen their waists inflate like helium balloons.
At the table next to me, three young women fearlessly took on milkshake cocktails and a “flight” of french fries (poutine, chili and au natural) before their entrees arrived. The price is in the right ballpark, too, with mains costing $12 to $18, and only one dish more than $20.
I visited only once, too traumatized to return for seconds. I tried the calamari (deep-fried and excessively battered); mac and cheese balls with jalapeno (deep-fried); a pizza with chorizo, pepperoni, salami and ricotta cheese (I liked the crisp but soft-interior, nan–like crust); and lobster shepherd’s pie (generous with lobster, but not right in shepherd’s pie).
The menu isn’t adventurous, but it offers tweaks on familiar items such as lemon aioli with iceberg lettuce, truffles with mac and cheese, tequila lime dressing with wild B.C. salmon.
If I were 20, I might hang out with friends here, but I wouldn’t think it’s cool. Cool would be Main Street.
But what I am is of an age to take to the floor and scream: “Stop making that racket!”
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