re: Valentines' Restaurants

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

So just wondering, where did everybody go for Valentines?

My wife & I went for lunch at the Pacific Culinary Institute at entrance to Granville Island. They have a 2 for 1 special on Monday-Thursday for the rest of February. It's food prepared by student-chefs & the food is very fancy & tasty & the presentation is WOW! $22 & with tax/tip, works out to $15/person for a very fancy-smancy lunch. Great way to impress your date (even if you're married to him/her). I had the marinaded catfish with seafood couscous & kiwi-sweet onion sauce for my entree, a fried shrimp/scallop "ball" (some fancy name but it escapes me right now), & 3 different chocolate mousse dessert.

For dinner, we went to a really excellent Vietnamese restaurant on Hastings & Slocan (across the street from the library) called Phong Lan "Wild Orchid Vietnamese Restaurant". We let her friend (the owner) join us & she ordered. We had the Chef's Special Salad (WOW the best salad I've ever eaten) with prawns & all sorts of different vege & herbs. We also had the Deep Fried Seafood Dumplings, the Authentic Vietnamese Sweet & Sour Soup with Prawns, and Combo B (Prawn salad roll, grilled beef ribs (too die for), beef ball soup, on steamed rice. The food was soooooooooooo good. What a way to eat our way through our third Valentines together.

So, just wondering where other Canreefers went. Would you recommend it?

For us, we would recommend the Pacific Culinary Institute for the experience (cool to eat in a place with ambiance & fancy cuisine once in a while, but not break the bank).

We both highly recommend the Wild Orchid. In fact, after dinner, I talked to the owner & she agreed to give us a 10% discount if I decide to organize a reefer dinner there. For those interested, it will cost as little as $5-6 for the Vietnamese noodle bowls, to about $9 for the combo platters or $15-20 for the specialty dishes potpourri that we ate tonight. If people are interested, I will set up a new thread to help set dates & times & we can meet at my place before car-pooling over to pig out

In fact the food was so good, it made me forget about the $500+ bang-up I stupidly committed with my truck after lunch

Anthony