The Famous Warehouse

Here's another little gem I discovered in the heart of Downtown Vancouver.  The Famous Warehouse, and her two sister restaurants The Loose Moose, and The Factory (Famouse Anaconda) are all clustered around the Granville and Nelson area, and they all feature menus for eats under $5.95.  The Famous Warehouse has all items for $4.95.  $4.95!!!  How can you go wrong?  For a sit down, dine-in place, it's unheard of.  Even the fast-food places run burgers that cost about $5, just for the burger nowadays.

The place is smallish, so around lunch time, it can be a nightmare.  From my experience, if you hit this place just before noon, you'll probably get seated. 

I know there are other specials, but on Wednesdays, it's $0.15 a wing and they're decent wings, not too small, well seasoned, and not burnt to a crisp. 

I usually get The Works Burger, which is a surprisingly awesome burger for $4.95.  It comes with bacon, cheese, onion strings and a brioche bun.  It's not in the same league as say Romer's Burger, but it's got similar ingredients.  The burger is stacked pretty high and it helps if you cut it in half, just like at Romer's.  The bun is brioche so it comes apart very easily...the price you pay for a fancier bun.  When you bite into it, there's a nice mix of textures from the softness of the bun to the crispiness of the onion strings.  The patty is probably your run of the mill Costco patty, but it sure as hell beats some of the fast food offerings for the same price.   

Haha, I like to assuage my conscience by ordering my Works Burger with salad.  It's basically mixed greens in a simple vinagrette, and it's a bit of a hit and miss.  Sometimes the vegetation is fresh and crispy, other days, it's a bit soggy and over/underdressed.  The salad is a somewhat healthy alternative to the fries, which are not too bad actually.  Since discovering this place, me and some pals will visit this place a few times a month.  It's cheap and tasty, what else can I say?  :)

Ramen Sanpachi

Well, looks like another Hokkaido-style ramen shop has popped up in Vancouver.  Meh.......I was referred to this place by a friend, who told me this place has good ramen.  She doesn't even like ramen all that much, but if she liked it, a lot of people who are new to ramen, or seldom eat it, will probably like Ramen Sanpachi.  

Hokkaido style ramen is a bit lighter and probably more suitable for people who don't really like the heavy stuff........but its not my cup of tea. 

The place is open pretty late though, so this place will be able to pick up where a lot of other ramen shops don't.  Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I stepped into the place was how sterile looking the place was, sort of like Aji-sen.  The place was brightly lit, and the furniture and decor seemed very Ikea-like.   I felt like I was eating in an iPod rather than a ramen shop.  Most ramen shops I've been to in Japan would resemble something more like G-men, but with less character.

The Menu looked promising, and the place was licensed!  Personally, I like to have a glass of ice water with my ramen, but some like a cold beer I suppose.  I like G-Men because they automatically give you ice water, with a pitcher too!   

We had the Chashu Ramen and Butter Corn Ramen, and when we tried to order Gyoza, the were out.  Out of Gyoza???  Gyoza and ramen are a golden combination, how could they be out???  What was shocking still  was that if they still had gyoza available, it would only be deep-fried.....wtf?  Deep fried gyoza only?  What, are we in some kind of strange AYCE sushi restaurant suddenly?  I've never encountered deep-fried gyoza in any of the ramen shops, during all my trips to Japan.  But who knows, maybe deep fried gyoza exists in some obscure corner of a ramen shop in Yokohama or something.  Another thing they were out of was takenoko (bamboo shoots), something that's essential in a bowl of ramen.  I couldn't believe it, but anyway, in lieu, we got 10% off.

When the Butter Corn Ramen came, the block of butter was titanic.  Seriously, this thing was as big as the Titanic and probably would have won against the ice berg.  I took half of the block and dumped it into my Chashu/miso ramen because I thought that my broth looked a little "lean".  The broth for the butter corn ramen was also miso-base, and came with a lot of corn.

The Chashu ramen came with lots of chashu, and though it tasted alright, it was a little on the lean side (for you health nuts out there, you'd love it).  The ramen in both bowls were plenty, along with the veg (a bit too much for my personal liking - way too much moyashi).  For me personally, I thought the broth wasn't fatty enough, even with the butter, and not quite salty as I would like to have it.  For those of you who like your noodle soup light on fat and taste, this place is for you.

Not much of a review here, but my first and probably last visit to Sanpachi was heavily distracted by something that happened while I was there and positively ruined my experience here: 

For you authenticity nuts out there, Sanpachi's got at least one foot in the door.  Near as I can tell, the ramen chef is Japanese, along with much of the staff.  Sanpachi Ramen may have it's roots in Japan, however the owner of this location was probably made in ROC or PRC.  How do I know this?  I found out because the table next to us was occupied by a very peculiar group of people.  One young woman who was showing a bit of defiance in the beginning (but sobbing by the time we left), an older gentlemen with a huge gold Rolex sitting on the side quietly while this nasty old ba-ba (short, impolite way of saying obasan) was reaming out the young woman in a very Chinese-fashion (the way my mom used to when I was little, in public and broad day light, tear me a new one when I was bad).  From what I gathered, the nasty ba-ba was probably the younger woman's mother or other such rich relative and financier of operations.  The younger woman was apparently the owner of Sanpachi Ramen (maybe in name only) who was soon to be kicked out of her home or soon to be cut-off. 

Nasty ba-ba switched between Chinese an English while she lectured the younger one, and kept on repeating "The owner of Sanpachi owner has no money!  Shame of you!  Shame of you!"  Shame on me for eavesdropping?  I wasn't dropping any eaves as the nasty ba-ba was yammering so loud that other customers in our section were shaking their heads and I was considering asking for another table.  The servers were clearly embarassed because they couldn't say anything to the owner's mommy.

Anyway, sweet family bickering aside, it was pretty unprofessional to have that kind of discussion at the workplace (even if it is in another language), all the while eating and dining over a bottle of wine (yes, they had a bottle of white wine while eating at their ramen shop), whilst entertaining customers like myself with their bickering.  The snot running down the young woman's nose was almost enough to turn me off my meal. 

I apologize for reducing this entry to the level of a trashy tabloid magazine, but those people really irked me.  The chef and staff may be Japanese, but if the person in charge keeps running the place this way, they are going to run it into the ground.  My suggestion to the staff that work at Sanpachi Robson, find another employer.  Public humiliation of your child/"owner of the company" is perfectly acceptable in a dim sum restaurant like Po King or shopping mall (lol, like my mother used to do to me when I was a kid), we're used to seeing something like that, but not in a Japanese restaurant. 

Kirin Restaurant - Downtown

Name-brand Dim Sum at a high price doesn't guarantee the best food.  I've heard a lot about the Kirin chain, but haven't tried any until now.  Some of my friends told me their dim sum was good, but I was skeptical right away when they told me there were no dim-sum carts.  For me, dim sum has to have the carts, the restaurant has to be a bit mangy, service should be a bit crappy to God-awful, and it should be cheap.  Kirin downtown is none of these, so you can see how I was a bit skeptical at first.

The restaurant is kind of in a strange place, and it looks like the location was a complete afterthought.  The dining area seems to be a converted lobby/atrium of a business tower or something.  Anyway, it's a bit fancier than what I'm used to, and holy cow was this place clean.  Even the washrooms were pristine, which blew me away.  The cleanest washrooms I've ever been to in a Chinese restaurant and I actually felt safe using the facilities.  There are no pictures of this, so you'll have to take my word for it.

....Fancy looking menu...

...Fancy looking settings....

...Fancy looking tea pot with warmer...

....Fancy sauces - X.O. sauce.....

.....not so fancy mustard and chili....

The sauces.  We got some XO sauce, the standard mustard (which looked like it maybe have been set the night before) and chili combo, plus some soy sauce for my Japanese friends (they like to have the soy suace and mustard combo with the hagow and siumai).

The spring rolls came with a fork and spoon which were perfect for my cracker friend Todd.  Well, I have to admit, even Chinese people sometimes have trouble with the standard-issue yellow-plastic Chinese chopsticks  seen in most restaurants, especially with a hard item like the spring roll.

The coating was nice and crispy, only a little bit too oily (but what do you expect, these suckers are deep-fried), and the filling tasted good for the most part....just one gripe....

.....the spring rolls were chock-full of stuff my food eats - veggies.

They called this the seafood salad roll.....or something like that.

Some kind of creamy concoction in the middle with some assorted bits of seafood.  I'm told the Kirin location on Cambie makes this one way better.  So, this would not be the first time I've heard complaints of consistancy with the Kirin Chain.

The hagow were okay this particular day, although they didn't really impress me as something to write home about.  Let's just say they weren't bad.

Ah, the steamed spareribs....not many black beans, but either way, tasted good....too bad there were so few of them.  Decent bone/cartilidge to meat ratio.

The siu mai were.....siu mai....just like the hagow, nothing to make these stand out over other places.

I couldn't find the yu gou (deep fried taro dumplings) on the menu, but there was a picture of it so I ordered it.  Tasted good, but same as any other place.

And now for some not so dim sum items.  Some of my friends wanted to try some other stuff:

The yang chow fried rice was nice and shiny, just the way I like it.  Tasted great, but again, barely enough for me.

Tan-tan noodles, I could have made better at home to be honest.

The siu long bao didn't have much soup in them.  Either it leaked out, or weren't made very well, but everyone said these were dry inside.  They tasted okay, but it's disappointed when you nibble open the skin and don't find the scalding hot soup inside.

Sweets:

This is the first time I saw these referred to as sesame balls.....what I usually think about as sesame balls is those deep-fried things covered in sesame....this was just your run of the mill-sesame paste-filled tang yuan, covered in that powder. 

Mango Pudding.......

......with Coconut cream.  The pudding tasted like it was made the same time the mustard was put out.  A bit disappointing.

It was nice to get a hot steaming cloth to wipe our hands after, and I didn't notice until I just posted this picture that was a curly black hair in it.....gross

$86.02 for 5 people.....what the $%@&*!@ #*#*!!!!!!!  Suffice to say, I was not impressed by our bill.  I thought that was a little steep for dim sum, but then I thought "Hmmmm.....that must be the price for clean washrooms a downtown location".  Maybe the highrollers living in downtown Vancouver/Cole Harbour/Shangrila are used to prices like this, but it was a bit too much for my tax bracket.  Yeah, the food was okay, not bad, but not that great, yeah the washrooms were clean enought to eat in, and yeah, the rest of the place was clean and there were a few extras here and there, but I don't think I'll go back unless suddenly find myself in the next tax bracket, or I'm out with Young and Todd and can't convince them to come to the dives I prefer to eat in.