If you plan on visiting "Canada's new culinary capital" on your own and want to eat well, check out Portfolio.com's recommendations for where to dine alone in Vancouver, mostly featuring restaurants with bar seating or large communal tables.
Cauliflower is a pretty unpopular vegetable, isn't it? I'm not a huge fan (possibly because of the cauliflower and ketchup pasta I was subjected to as a kid), and I'm not alone, due in no small part to the fact that most people boil it to death. Take that same cauliflower, deep-fry it, and serve it in sandwich form, like they do at Nuba, in downtown Vancouver, and you may see a lot more converts.
While most people wouldn't think of a hot dog as a sandwich, Merriam-Webster defines a sandwich as "two or more slices of bread, or a split roll, having a filling in between." So a hot dog, in a bun, according to the dictionary is in fact a sandwich. Put that same hot dog in a bun and top it with ingredients normally found in a sushi restaurant, and you've got a Serious Sandwich. Or, as it's called in downtown Vancouver, a Japadog.
Open for almost two years, Japadog is exactly the kind of hot dog stand you'd expect in Vancouver, where the population is almost one-third Asian. In a lot of ways, it's like your typical downtown hot dog stand. They serve your standard all-beef dog, a few kinds of sausage, a turkey dog, and a veggie dog, all from a normal hot dog cart with that offers the typical condiments. But the real draw is the "Japa Style Menu." On it, you can choose from among three different Japanese hot dog concoctions in which the standard sauerkraut, ketchup, and mustard are replaced by seaweed, soy sauce, and wasabi mayo.
When we visited Vancouver a couple of years ago we had a series of good not great meals in what is supposed to be a great food city.
The best meal we had there was at Vij's 1480 W. 11th Avenue (604-736-6664), which melds Indian flavors, herbs and spices into an original contemporary cooking style. I hadn't thought about Vij's in awhile, but Sara Dickerman's piece about Vancouver's Indian food in last Sunday's New York Times reminded me that I wish Vij's was located in New York. The closest thing to Vij's in New York is the Bread Bar at Tabla. So if you're not going to Vancouver any time soon, hit the Bread Bar.
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