Discolor Online

Pramas and I have fallen into a bit of a rut as far as Vancouver eateries go. We have our favorites and we visit Vancouver dramatically less often than we used to, so naturally we are eager to return to our favorite haunts when we do make it back to the city. This time around, however, we decided to make the trip as "new" as possible, staying in a new hotel, eating at new restaurants, trying different activities.

After about a month of research into our possibilities for dining, we decided on Rob Feenie's restaurant, Feenie's. Feenie is also the owner of Lumiere (right next door) but the slightly more casual and definitely more affordable option of Feenie's won out. I made a reservation online for the earliest seating I could get, which was 8:00pm. This was a bit later than I'd wanted, as I had bought tickets to an improv comedy show down at Granville Island for 10:00pm, but it was doable. I made a special note of the time restriction on the reservation and asked that they call to let us know if an hour to an hour and a half wasn't going to be enough time.

Before leaving Seattle, I'd researched all the public transit routes and had maps, directions, and time tables all printed out, as well as ticket confirmations, reservation confirmations and anything else I could think of to help make our trip as smooth as possible. Vancouver has really good public transit, so I wasn't intimidated at all atthe thought of getting just about everywhere we needed to go by either bus or sky train.

Sadly, the online bus schedule and trip planner LIED. After half an hour of waiting for a bus to take us across the Burrard bridge, we discovered that he bus stopped running ten minutes before our printed schedule told us we were to catch it. LAME! WE started walking, ditched that plan quickly, hopped the next bus that would get us across the bridge at least, jumped off when it started heading off on an unknown route, and while walking again by happenstance managed to flag a cab. We got to the restaurant exactly on time!

The people at Feenie's were wonderful. The place was packed, especially the bar area where several parties of drunken women were boisterously enjoying themselves. They went to seat us, found the table still lingering over the bill, offered us drinks in foyer instead. After 20 minutes, we still weren't seated and I could see my hopes for the evening crashing and burning before my eyes. Three different people kept tabs on us and how we were doing, apologizing that they couldn't help the drunken ladies from the library retirement party figure out their bill any sooner, offering to get our meals started while we waited for our seats so we could be served right away. I somewhat dejectedly decided on the three-course prix fixe just to make things as simple as possible, fearing the worst.

Finally we were seated, in the shocking red bar room, next to a table of four women in their late thirties to mid-forties who were shamelessly hitting on the poor twenty-something bartender. They were a great source of entertainment throughout the evening, fashion victims who were there to see and be seen, who clearly felt they were somebodies. The worst of the bunch was the woman in the see-through white lace shirt with double-lace cuffs (and black lace-detail on her bra, just to make certain that you noticed it), overdone highlights, huge rock on her finger (which was, one could assume from her comments about her ex-husband, probably bought with his money). Couldn't have been more shallow if they were cut out of magazines and highly amusing.

Thanks to the attention of the hostess and manager in the foyer, we did not have to wait long before food and drink were in front of us. We had a Belle-Vue Kriek (cherry lambic) to drink. Chris had the beef tartare, Roasted pork with greens and sweet potato puree, and cheese plate for his meal. I had the wild mushroom tart tatin, the mission trout with wild rice and caper and raisin brown butter sauce, and the port wine and chocolate chunk ice cream. Everything was done to perfection! In fact, when the wrong type of cheese was brought out for Chris, they told him to keep it and brought out an entirely new second cheese plate to make up for the mistake (and both were excellent).

With time running late, the manager (I'm assuming that was his position) came to check in with us as he was aware we needed to be out of there and at Granville Island for the show before 10:00pm. He personally handled making sure our bill was rung up and had a cab waiting for us as soon as we were ready to leave. Outstanding service from everyone involved, and they absolutely saved the night for us.

The links above lead to photos of all the dishes we tried at Feenies. In particular I was very impressed with the trout. I've had a lot of wild rice and fish combinations (being from Minnesota, these things are often on the menu) but I've never had anything like this dish. I've certainly never had raisins in my caper sauce and I was just a little dubious about the combo when I saw it on the menu. I'm so glad I didn't balk, because it was outrageously good and I could have licked my plate!

I had meant to do a detailed analysis of each individual dish, because they were that good, but I've gone on long enough so suffice to say the food was quite excellent and I would recommend Feenie without hesitation, though perhaps not for a night when you're in a hurry to get to a show. The food and the environment deserve to be savored and enjoyed in a more leisurely manner.