A foodie at Feenie's

Yesterday was Rocco' one year anniversary of moving to Vancouver. We celebrated in style with a reservation at Feenie's. Iron Chef Rob Feenie opened Lumière on Broadway, quickly followed by Feenie's next door. The two restaurants share the same kitchen but Lumière is considered haute cuisine while Feenie's is supposed to be Rob getting back to his roots, cooking for the people. Uh huh.

I promised a couple people the full report, so I hereby dedicate this blog entry to a description of our sumptuous meal.
Rocco began with the daily ravioli: butternut squash ravioli with roasted pine nuts in a light citrus cream sauce. This dish was truly amazing and I could have eaten just that and been satisfied. Reluctantly I limited myself to half a ravioli and a few dips of the sauce with bread. I chose the daily soup for my starter, a gin tomato soup garnished with basil oil. Yummy, but pretty much a basic tomato soup. We ordered a bottle of Yalumba grenache for the meal that turned out to be quite full and fruity but not overpowering.

On to the main course. I opted for the single vegetarian option in the entree section of the menu, rigatoni with butter-braised tomatoes, cultivated mushrooms, arugula and goat's cheese, finished with shaved parmesan. The dish was quite good, but the tomatoes were out of this world! I'll have to experiment a little to determine exactly what "butter-braised" actually means in practice because they definitely made the dish. Rocco had a number of items to choose from and he went with the shepherd's pie. Duck confit and corn topped with truffle scented mashed spud, accompanied by an au jus. I didn't taste this but he ate every last morsel on the plate and claimed it was delicious.

To finish, we split the daily brulee which turned out to be an amaretto, vanilla bean brulee. There's no way one person could have finished it, the portion was so large. Mmm, mm good! Perfectly torched, lovely and creamy, and still light enough that we didn't waddle away from the table

This meal was very good. Did it live up to his reputation as an Iron Chef? Maybe. Apart from the ravioli, the food wasn't shockingly good. The service was excellent (our waiter's name was something like Giuseffe (Gee-you-sef-fay)) and, wonderfully, we ended up being the sole table in a little private room so we felt very special. I will absolutely go back for other seasonal dishes but there are more restaurants in this town that are begging to be explored. Have no fear, I will report on our various foodie adventures in the city!