Beautiful Sunday

I am up to my elbows in work right now, but I feel it necessary to write about an evening I had this last week that was truly awesome. It my was buddy Ryan’s birthday, and so Candace and I and Ryan and his wife Jenn went out on a double date that was pretty cool indeed for a couple of reasons, the first being the culinary adventure we embarked on at Chambar in Vancouver. This is one of those restaurants that is very posh, pretty expensive, and totally amazing. Even the beer was top notch. I have a personality trait that drives me to always try the new foods and flavors on a menu that I have never experienced and this place offered a few. Chambar is Belgian, so the food has a hearty European feel to it, but uses some unusual ingredients that really piqued my interest. I started with an amazing beer called Bellevue-Kriek. It is a bright red brew, a lager that is aged in oak barrels along with cherries. The result is candy in a glass. Seriously, it was the best beer I have had in a long time. So we were off to a good start.
Next up were the appies, and literally every appetizer on the menu sounded appealing. There was crab ravioli, crispy duck in phyllo (Ryan and Jenn has that one), Coquille St. Jacques (maple glazed scallops), and… Carpaccio D’Autriche. That’s right, Ostrich Carpaccio. I ate Ostrich… raw Ostrich… and it was awesome. Carpaccio is simply seared on the outside very quickly and then arranged on the plate pretty much raw. The trick is, at least in this case, there is a dressing they put on it made from 16 year old sherry and some other acidic elements that essentially cook the Ostrich as it sits on the plate (but not really). It then had a bit of salad on top of it, and some cheese (although, in my first faux pas of the night, I thought the cheese was a bit of fancy white lettuce and I stuck the whole thing in my mouth think it was lettuce and having a momentary fit wondering what horrendously textured vegetable I had put in my mouth. Turns out it was cheese and all was right with the world, except for the fact that the cheese was supposed to go with the Carpaccio. Oh well). The dish was outstanding though, had a nice tanginess to it, and as an added bonus I can add raw Ostrich to my list of weird things I have eaten.
The next beer was Leffe, another Belgian delight, flavored with a hint of cloves. I enjoyed that a lot. For the main I chose La Petite Grillade, but there wasn’t anything small about it. It was a hearty dish of Venison tenderloin cooked to absolute perfection, Elk sausage flavored with Juniper berries, and green beans wrapped with wild boar bacon. The potatoes that came with it were accented with fennel and the entire dish was heaven on a plate. I imagined myself in some Bavarian mountain range, chowing down on the results of the week’s hunt. Well, not really, but man oh man was it good. The sausages were a particular highlight, not being a huge fan of Juniper flavoring I was skeptical but it paid off.
For dessert I ordered a glass of Port and a pot de crème (pudding, everything sounds amazing in French) that still has me yearning for more. This simple pudding was milk chocolate and bergamot flavored. Bergamot, you know the flavoring in Earl Grey Tea? Yeah, that and chocolate, think about it… can’t put it together can you? Me neither and yet it was probably the best dessert I have ever had. It had these cookies with it too, but it was the pudding that made it for me. Wow, wow, wow. Soooooo good, and the best part is I can at least attempt to duplicate the taste at home. How hard can it be to mix Bergamot and Milk Chocolate pudding, not to belittle the chef or anything because that flavor combo is a freakin stroke of genius.
After our unreal meal, we headed out into the downpour to GM Place just around the corner to catch James Blunt. We got there just as the opening act was going on. I didn’t catch the name when they were introduced, but the quality made me look em up. Starsailor is their name, not the greatest moniker IMO (oooh look at me using netspeak) but they have a sound that is really something special. A little bit like early U2, maybe a little more raw, they definitely had hooks to their song that made me want to hear more. I looked them up on Napster and found them without too much difficulty. Good tunes. The man himself, Mr. Blunt, is a talented guy to say the least and scratches my current musical itch of a more acoustic raw male vocalist. The guy is a talented songwriter and what I liked so much about the show is that it relied on the profound lyrics and excellent vocals and not on having my eardrums beg for mercy. As a bonus he had a light show that was really impressive, well sort of. It was like watching enormous Windows Media Player visualizers. It was at times entrancing, at times it had me wondering if I was watching Japanese Seizure Robots, but it always suited the mood of the music. The last song of the night was Beautiful, and as I stood there with my arm around my gorgeous wife, and my stomach still satisfied, and my ears filled with song I couldn’t agree more.