Following my brother's short visit, I've learned to appreciate and embrace Vancouver's wide array of good food. So I've began to try out more food in and out of campus.

 I checked out Afghan Horsemen on this Tuesday. Based on the good online ratings, I had pretty high expectation of the restaurant.

The restaurant was nicely decorated. Besides from the usual table and chairs, there is also more private rooms and a place that you take off your shoes and sit with cushions. Afghan music was played and methought it sounded like Indian music. Let's talk about the food there, I ordered Combo Kebab Plate that night which was supposed to come with a combination of chicken, beef, and lamb kebabs. It turned out that the lamb kebab was nowhere to be found. This plate comes with baked rice, salata (some kind of toasted bread) with feta cheese, batter fried potatos, and yogurt dip. The kebab tasted like any other Middle East (e.g. Lebanon) food, nothing too special. It was pretty good but not too appealing to me, not my taste I guess. I found the fired potatos extremely tasty, although it might not be very healthy. Staff was very friendly, constantly asked me if I'm doing alright and refilled my water from time and time. The food was a bit pricey, that meal cost me about $20. Oh yeah, I ordered dough, a kind of Afghan drink - a mixture of yogurt and salt. It was a very weird drink, I didn't like it.

On Wednesday, I decided to visit the restaurants in a place called "The Village" in my campus. For your information, it is a place where the banks on the campus, a Staples stationery shop, a liquor store, some privately owned restaurants, cafes, and a discounted textbook shop, etc. are located. I went to a stall named Yi Kou Xiang to taste their 杂饭. I got three dishes with 5 bucks. The food was very good, much to my surprise. I knew they have good food in the village, but I didn't expect it to be this good. The lemon chicken I had tasted like ku lo yuk, but the meat is very tender. I think this is the food with the best quality:price ratio I've tried. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who comes to my campus.

 

On Thursday, I went to an Indian restaurant called Akbar's Own. It looks like any other high class restaurant, albeit with Indian theme and background. The service is very good, the waitress is very friendly. I ordered saffron rice and lamb tikki masala. The serving was smaller compared to other restaurants, but the taste is arguably the best I've ever experienced. You can basically feel the spices at work and the richness of the flavour lingers in your mouth. It comes with a hefty price tag though - $16

Saffron rice & lamb tikki masala

Today (or should I say last night), I had dinner at the Hon's Wun Tun House for the second time. The service was pretty good. I ordered 牛杂干捞面-dry noodle with beef and cow's "spare parts" - and also 粽子 (glutinous rice w/ yolk and pork). Again, I ate too much and nearly puked after I wiped out everything. The slices of cow's heart were pretty gross and the smell wasn't very enticing, but pretty much everything else was ok. The glutinous rice was excellent, I haven't had this since I came to Vancouver. Everything for $11. Great value. Great success.

 

Conclusions: Vancouver is a place of great food from a wide variety of cultures - Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and so much more. But everything's pretty expensive. If you ask me, I'd say, do away with all those ambience and atmosphere stuff and gimme cheaper prices! To me, they don't really matter: 1. You can't eat them. 2. They don't improve the taste of the food. 3. I usually forget about them after 5-10 minutes. I want the taste only, I don't even care much about the hygience as long as I don't see cockroach in my food or shit in the cook's ring. I'll have to cut down on my food tasting trips as it just cost too much. Vancouver = expensive (well, for the most part).

 

[Exeunt]