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Breakfast at Dish Cookhouse & Diner

September 24, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 7 Comments

Farmer’s Skillet with House Smoked Sausage and Ham

There are more breakfast places in Victoria that you can count, but because going out for breakfast on the weekend is such a popular sport among the locals, most restaurants have a huge line-up by 9:30 am. We have our regular favorite breakfast spot in town, but sometimes you have to break out of your routine. This morning we drove out to Sidney (about 20-30 minutes away) to have breakfast at Dish Cookhouse & Diner. We first heard about this place about a year ago from my parents, and we’ve been going back ever since, whenever we aren’t feeling too lazy/starving to survive the drive out there in the morning. Aside from serving up awesome food, the place is never busy (which is surprising because the food is so good), and we have never had to wait for a table. It’s located in the industrial area of Sidney, which probably explains why it’s not super busy on a weekend morning – but that’s just fine with me!

They smoke their own ham, sausage, and bacon, and make their own jam. The ham is amazing – I’m not sure which cut of pork they use, but it reminds me almost of Chinese bbq pork with the ratio of meat to fat and the slightly spiced, sweet, smokey flavour. Seriously, some of the best breakfast ham I’ve ever had. This morning I had the ham benny and it was delicious – yummy hollandaise sauce, too.

House Smoked Ham Benny

The portions are large, but not in that oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-die-if-I-eat-this kind of way – it’s not your average deep-fried, grease-laden, heavy diner breakfast. The ingredients are fresh, tasty, and very well-prepared. Their regular breakfast menu (they also have a lunch menu, but we’ve only ever been for breakfast) includes the traditional eggs with bacon/ham/sausage with hash browns and toast, as well as omeletes, skillets (corned beef hash, turkey sausage and bacon hash, veggie hash), french toast, and eggs bennies. They also have monthly and daily/weekly breakfast specials. The last time we were there, Nate and I both ordered the specials: Nate had a bacon cheddar burger benny, and I had the special french toast with bananas in rum caramel sauce. Both were insanely delicious (although I’ll admit I was in a bit of a carb-coma after!).

Special French Toast with Bananas in Rum Caramel Sauce, with awesome grilled ham on the side

I don’t know why this place isn’t more popular. I guess it’s because it’s a bit far from downtown, but it’s definitely a better alternative to waiting in line for a mediocre breakfast in a crowded restaurant. The service is great, the coffee is good, and the prices are comparable to any other breakfast place – for the food you’re getting, it’s a steal. If you live in Victoria, Dish should be your next breakfast destination!

Dish Cookhouse & Diner on Urbanspoon

Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: breakfast, Dish Cookhouse & Diner, food, restaurant, Victoria BC

The Cachagua Store Restaurant

September 3, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

Towards the end of my visit to California, my aunt, uncle and I made an epic journey to have dinner at the Cachagua Store. This is a restaurant run out of a general store in the boonies of Cachagua, Carmel Valley. The restaurant is only open on Mondays, and the rest of the time the chef runs a catering company (A Moveable Feast) out of the kitchen. The restaurant receives mixed reviews from people who, after driving for an hour into the sticks on perilously twisty back-country roads, are expecting a fine dining experience, because it is certainly not that – no white table cloths, no white-shirted servers, no sterling silver flatware. But the food was awesome – locally sourced, regional specialties, interesting preparation methods, with a different menu every week – and just being in the restaurant was an experience in itself.

And so was the hour-long journey into the back of beyond to get there. We started the drive with rolling hills and large fields on either side of a wide, straight road, and as we drove further, the hills got closer together, the fields disappeared, the trees got closer and closer, and the road got narrower and windier. Then abruptly we took a right hand turn up the side of one of the hills onto another road full of twists and hairpin turns and bounded on either side by Spanish-moss covered trees. As we reached the top of the hill, the road stayed just as twisty and narrow, and we could see the spines and valleys and tops of other hills – some green with trees, some golden yellow with grass. It was incredibly beautiful.

This picture from the car window doesn’t even come close to doing the view justice.

Eventually the road plunged downward again – still with the death-defying blind corners and 180-degree turns – and finally we found ourselves in a gravel “parking lot” full of pick-up trucks in front of a red painted wooden building with the Cachagua Store sign out front. I half expected to see an old guy with no teeth, wearing overalls, playing a banjo on the front stoop.The restaurant entrance was just a door at one end of the building with a flourescent “Open” sign, and we entered gingerly, not sure what to expect.What we saw was a room full of tables with checkered tablecloths and folding chairs, exposed beams, a moose I mean elk head on the wall (decorated with Christmas lights) at one end, an open kitchen at the other, and paper curtains on the windows.A band consisting of a guitar player and a percussionist were setting up in one corner. A wait staff of mostly young local girls was hanging out around the kitchen entrance. We arrived at 6 pm, and were told that the menu hadn’t even been printed yet – the chef was still finalizing some things. When it did arrive, it was an impressive two pages long – one whole page of starters and another of main courses.At this point the sun started to set, and the candle on our table wasn’t doing very much to help out the dim lighting in the room, so these photos are pretty low quality (I was using my iPhone). For starters, my uncle had beef tartare with tarragon ice cream and the most delicious tomato gazpacho I’ve ever tasted – it was deeply tomato flavoured, with a herby-infused oil drizzled on top. I don’t even like raw tomatoes but this was fantastic. Definitely one of the highlights of the meal.My aunt had a poached egg on top of sauteed greens and trumpet mushrooms that was also surprisingly delicious – she said it wasn’t at all what she expected, but she was really disappointed when it was all gone!I had a starter-size pizza with homemade mascarpone, ham, and caramelized onions.It was good, but not quite what I wanted. This whole meal, actually, was an instance where I did not do a very good job of ordering food for myself, which happens sometimes when there is just too much choice in a menu. It all tasted good and was prepared beautifully, but I felt like I would have enjoyed different dishes more. Oh well, a good excuse to go there again!

My uncle had pork done six ways for his main course: a pork chop, pork chili verde, pork belly, roast pork loin, trotters, and something else – maybe a pork sausage? I can’t remember. It was a lot of pork, to say the least, and he barely got through a third of it.My aunt had the duck – a seared breast and confit leg, which must have been really good because she was not very interested in sharing ;).I had Mesquite grilled skirt steak with a mushroom sauce. The flavours were good but I was really full from my pizza starter and I spent a lot of the meal being a little jealous of my aunt’s duck.My uncle opted out of dessert, but my aunt and I perused the page-long menu and finally decided on a dark chocolate mousse (her) and a white chocolate-berry parfait (me). The mousse came served with a crouton, olive oil drizzle, and two kinds of sea salt around the edge of the plate. Sounds weird, but the flavours of the oil and the salt played off the dark chocolate in an amazing way.Once again I had food envy – my parfait was  okay, but mostly just sweet (but it didn’t stop me from eating all of it!).Throughout the meal, the band played bluegrassy, countrified versions of popular songs with moderate success – they got considerably better after their first beverage break, so I guess they just needed to loosen up.The service was friendly, but slow and intermittent (the various wait staff went back and forth by our table almost non-stop, but paid us very little attention and we had to flag someone down each time we wanted to order). However it meant that there was ample opportunity for people-watching and you could tell everyone was having a good time, appreciating the food and slightly eccentric atmosphere.

So if you ever have the opportunity to drive into the middle-of-nowhere Carmel Valley, I recommend you do it on a Monday night so you can check out the Cachagua Store. If you’re open to an interesting food experience, you’ll enjoy yourself.

Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: Cachagua General Store, California, Carmel Valley, food, local food, restaurant

Eating Out in San Francisco, Part II: Dinner at Millennium

August 9, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 12 Comments

Read Part 1: Lunch at the Zuni Café

After stuffing ourselves full of delicious Zuni Café roast chicken at lunch, we spent the rest of our San Francisco afternoon shopping in Union Square and Chinatown (I bought a dress, some shoes, a ring, a scarf, and a comforter – because that’s a really easy thing to bring home in a suitcase, right?!), and then finally ended up at Millennium for dinner. Millennium is a vegetarian restaurant that specializes in healthy, sustainable, environmentally-friendly foods, served in a very up-scale manner. In fact, their entire menu is actually vegan – completely free of animal products – but they stick with the vegetarian label because it is more approachable. Nonetheless, the phrase “vegetarian restaurant” can conjure up images of aging hippies eating bean sprouts, brown rice, and tofu by the forkful, not ladies sporting Fendi Spy handbags, enjoying sophisticated food in an elegant, white-linen’d dining room. But that’s exactly what Millennium delivered. Plus they had these really cool light fixture things:

Apparently the “fishnet” is made of recycled paper bags, and the curtains behind are made from recycled plastic bags. Talk about sustainable!

The menu was quite extensive, but after some serious perusing, we settled on appetizers. My uncle had the Crusted Oyster Mushrooms, breaded in rice and sesame flour and deep fried, which looked like calamari and were deliciously crunchy. He was a little disappointed because they didn’t taste very mushroom-y, so maybe breading and deep-frying wasn’t the best treatment for something as subtle as an oyster mushroom.My aunt had a black bean and caramelized plantain torte.I had the Chickpea Panisse: a chickpea purée with a firm, almost custard-like texture that was panfried like polenta and served with sautéed mushrooms, onions, raisins, and spiced almonds on top and a roasted garlic-cashew cream sauce underneath. I love chickpeas so this was an easy choice for me. Yummy.Next up were the entrées. My uncle continued with the mushroom theme and got the Huitlacoche Tamale, but again found that the mushroom flavour wasn’t as prominent as he was hoping for.My aunt had a coconut curry dish that she said was full of very interesting flavours.I had the Brick Pastry, which turned out to be a strudel-like construction of very thin pastry rolled around a filling of seitan, sautéed chard, potatoes, and mushrooms, served over black lentils, green beans, and mushrooms, with a red currant sauce. It was delicious. I’d never had seitan before, and the flavour was quite strong, but still tasty, and the whole thing was balanced really nicely by the acidity of the red currant sauce. And the lentils were awesome – they were almost my favorite part (I never thought I’d say that about lentils!).Then my aunt and I shared a dessert. This one was seriously mind-blowing: you would never guess that it wasn’t packed full of dairy and eggs. We had the Chocolate Midnight, which was white chocolate and dark chocolate-mocha mousse on a chocolate nut crust with raspberry sauce. Absolutely to die for.Their dessert menu was perhaps the most impressive, because it was all egg- and dairy-free but they still managed to make several kinds of ice cream. Our server told us they use different bases of coconut, almond, rice, and soy milks, and somehow they can even make a dairy-free, vegan “buttermilk” ice cream! I want to go back just to try all their desserts.

This was a really impressive meal and a great example of amazing food – vegetarian, vegan, or otherwise. I didn’t even notice that there wasn’t any meat in my meal, and I certainly didn’t miss it! If you are in San Francisco, definitely give Millennium a visit – try the ice cream and report back to me!

Millennium on Urbanspoon

Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: dinner, eating, food, Millennium restaurant, restaurant, San Francisco, vegan, vegetarian

Eating Out in San Francisco, Part I: Lunch at the Zuni Café

July 29, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

My recent trip to Pacific Grove/Monterey, California, to visit my aunt and uncle contained horrific travel (delayed flights resulting in missed connections in both directions, leading to one miserable overnight in the San Francisco airport on the trip down and another 8 hour “layover” in the same airport on the way home. Plus the airline lost my luggage. A word of advice: don’t fly United!) and amazing restaurants. The day after I arrived, we drove up to San Francisco for a day of shopping (I needed a dress for the wedding I’m making the cake for ;)) and eating: we had lunch reservations at the Zuni Café, and dinner reservations at Millenium Restaurant. Both were highly anticipated, and I was pretty excited.The Zuni Café is an award winning restaurant that has been around since the late 1970s (in a slightly different incarnation than it is now, involving a Weber grill and espresso machine that also doubled as an element to scramble eggs on?!) and as such is pretty well-known (at least in the San Francisco food scene, of which I am not a part!). In addition to their focus on seasonal ingredients from sustainable sources, and one of the things the restaurant is known for is their wood-burning brick oven, which is smack-dab in the middle of their open kitchen. They bake their own bread in that oven, and they also do a whole roast chicken, served on top of a bread salad, which has a reputation for being awesome, which is why we ordered it. But I’m getting ahead of myself….

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Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: bread, chicken, eating, food, lunch, restaurant, San Francisco, Zuni Cafe

Afternoon Tea at the Gatsby Mansion

June 2, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

July 2012 update: The Gatsby Mansion has recently come under new ownership and has a new chef, and their afternoon tea is now very good. Read my new review here!

Once again, Lynette and I had a hankering for afternoon tea, and as the White Heather Tea Room was closed, we figured this would be a great time to try out one of the other establishments in Victoria that serves tea (there are a lot of them). We decided on the Gatsby Mansion, and brought our friend Candice with us. Frankly I’m sorry that this was her first afternoon tea experience, because it was definitely sub-par. Hopefully that means it can only get better from here!

As you can see above, the Gatsby Mansion restaurant is beautiful on the outside, and the restaurant inside has definite potential from a decor point of view, but it felt like it was trying to be grand without really making the full effort to BE grand. The ceiling of the room we were in was very ornately painted, and I couldn’t decide whether it was pretty, or pretty awful. The fake crystal chandelier was definitely leaning towards pretty awful, however.…

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Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews, Tea Parties Tagged With: afternoon tea, Gatsby Mansion, restaurant, Victoria BC

Second Saturday: Dinner at Pizzeria Prima Strada

May 23, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

I almost didn’t post about this Second Saturday outing, because the pictures I took are so awful (crappy cell phone camera + dark restaurant = baaaaaaad photos), but the pizza was so good that I can’t not share. So here it is. Please excuse the photos!

This edition of Second Saturday actually took place on a Monday, because I was out of town for the second Saturday of May. Katheryn, Lynette, and I met for dinner at Pizzeria Prima Strada in Cook St Village for beautiful, thin-crust, oven-fired, Neapolitan-style pizza. We had all eaten there before, so Second Saturday was just a good excuse to eat there again. One thing I really like about this restaurant is that they use fresh, Vancouver Island ingredients wherever possible, including mozzarella di bufala from Natural Pastures (made with milk from Fairburn Farms, home to the only water buffalo herd in Canada!), pepperoni made by Choux Choux Charcuterie, and house made sausage and salumi. I love food even more knowing that something so delicious is produced or grown nearby!

The menu is pretty small, which I usually find is a good thing, because it means the kitchen is not trying to do a hundred different things; instead they are focused on doing one kind of thing very well, and it usually results in a much better meal. In Prima Strada’s case, there are a few Antipasti and Insalata offered, ten different pizzas to choose from, Dolci (desserts), and some daily specials. They also have a succinct wine list and serve local Driftwood Brewery beer and several Italian liquors. The pizzas range from the cheeseless Marinara to the traditional Margherita to the spicy salame Diavola to the cream-based Panna e Pancetta. We ended up going with the Funghi (porcini cream, roasted mushrooms, roasted onions, fresh thyme, mozzarella, pecorino), the Panna e Pancetta (cream, pancetta, parmigiano, mozzarella, ricotta, scallions), and a special pizza with spicy Calabrese salami, roasted red pepper, arugula pesto, bocconcini, and red onion. We also ordered a bottle of wine, Mezzomondo Rosso, which was good but honestly I can’t remember anything specific about how it tasted. I was concentrating more on the pizza ;)…

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Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews, Second Saturday Tagged With: eating, food, local food, Neapolitan pizza, pizza, restaurant, Victoria BC

Lunch at Café Ceylon

April 4, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

On Saturday, my mum came over to Victoria to visit for the day. We did some errands downtown, browsed through some kitchen shops and bookstores, and went out for lunch. We were planning on going to The Blue Nile, which is an Ethiopian restaurant in Esquimalt, but it turned out they weren’t open for lunch. Instead, we went to Café Ceylon – and am I ever glad we did!

Café Ceylon serves Sri Lankan and Indonesian food, and after reading a favourable review of it – on Urban Spoon, maybe? – I had made a mental note of it as somewhere to take my mum, because she is an adventurous eater and loves trying out ethnic food (as do I!). Luckily I had the foresight to put the restaurant’s location in my phone, so when we discovered that Ethiopian food wasn’t going to happen, I had an alternative….

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Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: Cafe Ceylon, Indonesian food, restaurant, seafood, Sri Lankan food

Wing Wednesday at Christie’s Carriage House Pub

February 10, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

This evening Sam, Nate, and I went to Christie’s Carriage House Pub for wings and beer. We were worried that it would be super busy because not only was it Wing Wednesday, there was also a Canucks game on, but we got there around 6 and there was plenty of room.

Christie’s has good wings. I already knew that, but this visit cemented it. We had several flavours going on: sweet Thai chili (deliciously sticky and sweet with a chili kick), Saharan dry (crisp and spicy with a peppery dry rub), Blue Boy (hot sauce and blue cheese together in mouth-watering harmony) and teriyaki, which I didn’t taste but I’m sure was just as good as the others. So 10/10 on the wings.

So as to be slightly healthy along with my chicken wing binge, I ordered a small green salad. Often a salad in a pub is a sad thing, but this one was pretty good. The salad greens were crisp and fresh (romaine plus some spring-mix-ish leaves), the cucumber slice was not too unwieldy (I hate it when they hide a 3-inch long slice of cuke in the middle of a perfectly good salad), the carrot was freshly grated, and the pickled beet slivers on top were a nice touch, as were the dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds. I have a feeling that the sundried tomato dressing was not made in-house, but it was still tasty. I didn’t peruse the menu past the wings and salads, but the burgers at the next table looked awesome – stacked high on a hand-made-looking bun (?) and skewered with a steak knife.

Christie’s has an extensive collection of beers on tap – 34! – including lots of local island (Phillips, Vancouver Island, Driftwood) and mainland microbreweries. Every time I am there I mean to try the Back Hand of God stout, but I usually chicken out. Next time! This time I had the Driftwood ale, which was pretty good – bitter, but I’m starting to like bitter beer more and more.

The price was also quite reasonable: I had a dozen wings (29 cents each), a small salad, and the special beer on tap, which came to under $13 after tax. Pretty decent for a meal that included a beer.

I think the trick to Christie’s is figuring out when it’s not too busy, because we have tried to get in a few times before and they have had no space – and judging by the lineup at the door when we left at 7, it fills up when there is a hockey game on. But it’s safe to say we will be back to sample some more things off the menu, now that Nate’s wing craving has been satisfied.

Christie's Carriage House Pub on Urbanspoon

Filed Under: Eating Out, Restaurant Reviews Tagged With: beer, chicken, pub food, restaurant, wings

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I'm Korena: cook, baker, dirty-dishes-maker. My favourite things include flour, butter, sugar, and chocolate. Read More…

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