Winston Restaurant in North Vancouver on June 9. DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
First name: Winston
Location: 228 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver
Phone: 778-340-6393
Website: Winston-on-lonsdale.com
Kitchen: West Coast, from the farm to the Asian-inspired table
Prices: Dinner, shared dishes, $ 6- $ 40; Five-course chef’s menu, $ 50 per person
Additional Information: Open from Wednesday to Sunday, snack from 9 am to 3 pm, dinner from 5 pm to 9 pm It is recommended to book dinner. Pick-up and takeaway available. Small patio.
Douglas Lee took me to homemade fermented and smoked chili oil – finally, a young chef who hasn’t mislabeled his hot condiment as an XO sauce.
More fleshy than most crispy chili potatoes on the market, this attractive combination of 14 peppercorns smells and has a bit of chorizo with a sleek running Sichuan prickly ash.
By day, Winston is a cafe serving a wide selection of locally roasted coffee and brunch basics with intriguing twists. DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
The $ 4 dark crimson mud ramekin includes an underestimated “not at all mild” warning on the menu. But we were so busy dipping our sweet muffins into brioche as we tried to identify the complex flavors, which caught us completely unawares by the scorching hell that crept into the slow end.
This is not a chili oil for the weak of the palate. I swear he pulled my papillae out of my tongue and almost ruined the rest of the food.
But it is bold, intense, totally unexpected and makes you sit back and notice. Like everything else in this modest North Vancouver cafe, it serves some of the most adventurous food in the Lower Mainland.
By day, Winston is a coffee shop that serves a wide selection of locally roasted coffee and brunch-based staple foods for brunch: 99-hour stewed pork cheeks next to the benny, for example, or fluffy pandan toast with vanilla butter. and Ovaltine condensed milk.
The bright, airy and minimalist space is simply decorated with plants and light pendants hanging from the double-height ceilings, polished cement floors, wooden accents, a padded window corner and a long common table in the center.
Opened at the height of the pandemic, Winston is owned by Andrew Boutilier, who also operates the Koffie Café, only during the day, in downtown Vancouver. Friendly and soft-spoken, it reminds me of the famous local retired restaurateur John Bishop, a consummate professional who is too old to be called a hipster, but follows the latest trends (the restaurant’s natural wine list is his passion) as he walks towards at your own pace and take a risk with a young punk in the kitchen.
Although Winston’s menus are largely plant-based, the meat dishes were the most memorable. DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
Executive chef Douglas Lee, 24, has local experience in many of Vancouver’s best-known restaurants, including Hapa Izakaya, Joeys, Savio Volpe, L’Abattoir and Nightingale. But he probably learned more while performing at various influential restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Kyoto, which he asked not to identify because he was working illegally.
He was a total stranger before Winston, but has the creation of a star. This includes being self-aware enough to make your unfiltered Instagram account private, something you did recently.
Mr. Lee relies heavily on his Asian heritage (a mix of many cultures, he explained by phone, but mostly Cantonese), but his cuisine cannot be categorized. And while their menus are largely plant-based, their meat dishes were the most memorable.
Obviously, you’re having a lot of fun with the a la carte dinner menu, for which the portions are huge and the flavors are wild.
Some menu items, such as the billionaire’s cabbage, with a charred wedge like a steak served on an “animal” meaty ragout and a thick powder of shaved truffled white cheddar, are successful.
Others, like the greasy turnip baconator, with its bitter aftertaste, oily residue, and “shiny” orange cheddar, not so much. This last dish looked like a junk food version of the first one and could probably be removed.
Barbecue dandelion mushrooms were rehydrated and sautéed to order in a Chinese Butter Master Oil.DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
But the barbecue dandelion mushrooms, rehydrated and sautéed to order in a Chinese master oil butter (strengthened and enriched over time, like a master broth, from a base of fried shallots and onions) was absolutely delicious. The sweet flavors were anchored with cumin and lit with fresh dill. The spongy texture of the mushrooms was balanced with the dentate teeth of the brown carrots. And the presentation, topped with a cookie-sized puffed rice lid, was an elegant game on the subject of mushrooms. To me, it tasted like a tofu map through the lens of a French chef.
Mr.’s half-aged chicken. Lee was the piece of resistance. The variation of Mr. Lee from a Beijing duck is put in brine, smoked cold and dried in the fridge for at least four days to safely add a slight smell of umami funk. I assumed he cooked it in a Rational oven because the dark mahogany skin had a crunchy crunch, but I was surprised to find that it was actually carefully roasted because his oven was in a blink of an eye.
If you are going to try this restaurant, I highly recommend the weekly roulette tasting menu for dinner. The dishes, mostly adapted from the menu, are more refined. And at $ 50 for five courses, it’s one of the best deals in town.
The triangular cabbage hummus has a satisfying mouthfeel. DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
Ours included quick pickled col-rave, well selected so that it didn’t get too watery, on a garlic hummus with crispy chickpeas for a more satisfying mouthfeel; smoked aubergine softened to a mild silkiness in a complex parsley remoulade; bottle shishito peppers on a creamy horseradish sauce with red sesame, salted nori and fresh herb oils; and a variation of the billionaire’s cabbage, which was softer steamed, served with a dressing of sesame gum and ginger and finished with homemade soybeans and aged in barrels.
When the final dish arrived, I was completely impressed by the effort, creativity and delicacy of each dish, but my palate was tired of an overabundance of sesame, more coincidence than design, says Mr. Lee. And I really wanted meat.
Mr. Lee delivered and ended the night on a high note with a sensationally tender, massively sliced beef ssam that had been cooked, aged, cooked slowly, and roasted to order, with crispy radicchio leaves to wrap, and a mix. of tasty pickles and smoked. mustard.
Beef saddle was sensationally tender and in massive portions.DARRYL DYCK / The Globe and Mail
All this was accompanied by an exceptionally warm service and a flight of elegant natural wines which meant a total theft for $ 25.
Winston would be like home on Main Street. But what a surprise it is to find him out of the box in the quieter surroundings of North Vancouver. Mr. Lee is a chef to watch. My only concern is that it’s working so hard it could burn out before the slow but certain hipster migration through Burrard’s entrance gets it.
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