Listed below are our top restaurant choices. They are our favorite establishments in Vancouver through their menu, their interior design, and their service. As more pop up across our city, we'll try to visit them, review them, and then add them here if they leave us impressed! You can also use our Wayfinding page to search for other restaurant reviews we have written.
MISSION
2042 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver, BC
The food at Mission is based on well-sourced ingredients prepared with impeccable technique. Top Chef Canada All Star Curtis Luk leads the charge. There is focus on sustainability with a true nose-to-tail philosophy resulting in outstanding value for the quality and presentation. The core of Mission is a Pacific Northwest sharing plates menu truly focused on the bounty and history of our amazing region. Chefs tasting menu is always available if you would like to leave the choices to the talented kitchen team.
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NIGHTINGALE
1017 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
Nightingale, where modern Canadian cuisine gets social. Their approach to dining introduces simple seasonal dishes—packed with natural flavour—that focus on quality, excellence and fun. Served up in a lively space, their fresh crudo and charcuterie, creative house-made pastas, pizzas, crisp salads and seasonal veggie dishes can be enjoyed with friends old and new; paired with local craft beers, complementing wines or on-tap gin & tonics from the buzzing bar.
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BAUHAUS RESTAURANT
Located in Gastown, the restaurant is housed inside one of Vancouver’s unique historic buildings, The Boulder Hotel, which was originally built in 1890. Over the last 100 years, the building has gone from its early days as a saloon, to a bank, and a hotel. Led by Vancouver designer Andrea Greenway, the restaurant has been designed to work within this historic space, featuring a dining room, a large lounge area, and an open-concept kitchen. Owned by German film director Uwe Boll, the award-winning restaurant is known for its modern take on German cuisine and attention to detail. The menu delicately balances European cuisine with West Coast influences.
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HOMER STREET CAFE
Housed in two of Vancouver’s most iconic buildings, Homer St Cafe and Bar is a contemporary restaurant set in the historic Homer Building and new Beasley building in Vancouver’s Yaletown district. Classic comfort cooking takes centre stage thanks to a fire engine red rotisserie that roasts all manner of proteins. It’s chicken that’s the star here: served in quarter, half or whole portions, accompanied by classic sides basted in jus. A decidedly adventurous wine and cocktail list rounds out the menu.
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BIRDS & THE BEETS
An insanely food-focused counter-service cafe focusing on the coffee and service components. The idea behind Birds and the Beets is to get people to rethink the traditional 'coffee and baked goods' cafe model. To that end, they dish out breakfast items like Bircher muesli, house-made yogurt with granola and fruit, and brioche bun breakfast sandwiches. For lunch, you can expect items like albacore tuna salad with egg and avocado yogurt, lamb leg sandwiches with mint apple jelly, harissa yogurt spread, arugula, and roasted fennel, and special salads of pickled vegetables, fresh herbs, and sous vide proteins.
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ROYAL DINETTE
950 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver, BC
Royal Dinette pairs the laidback, informal atmosphere of a bygone diner with an elegant standard of service to bring quality, value and creative farm-to-table cuisine to downtown Vancouver. Good food is sourced locally and showcases a diversity of artisanal, seasonal ingredients that should be accessible and approachable to everyone. Royal Dinette captivates guests with a focus on fresh, quality driven food without complexity. They feature an ever-changing seasonal menu, fresh pasta made daily, and a bar menu offering an array of local craft beer, sparkling wine, and handcrafted cocktails.
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CHAMBAR
568 Beatty Street, Vancouver, BC
A leader in quality fusion, each dish offers hints of global flavours typically hard to find in Vancouver. The room's design juxtaposes rudimentary elements like brick walls, heavy wooden beams, and thinly planked ceilings with Mediterranean expressions of bright teals, modern textile adaptations, and gilded details. Chambar's well-travelled Belgian chef has successfully weaved Western African valiance with Western European rigor: a menu much deserving of its ceaseless praise.
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ASK FOR LUIGI
305 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC
Ask for Luigi is a casual and intimate Italian-inspired restaurant, specializing in fresh hand made pasta. The service is family-style: all dishes are meant for sharing and food arrives to the middle of the table, as it is ready. The antipasti usually arrive first, with pasta dishes close behind. They also have amazing house made gluten free options available daily. Their dishes are best enjoyed with wine. All of their wines are available by the half litre and bottle, which means that many of them can be ordered by the glass. All menu items are available for dine-in or take-out.
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L'ABATTOIR
217 Carrall Street, Gastown, Vancouver, BC
L’Abattoir is located in the center of Gastown between historic Gaoler’s Mews and Blood Alley. The restaurant was built in the 19th century and is the site of Vancouver’s first jail. Originally buttressed to the city’s main butchery and meat packing district, the name L’Abattoir pays homage to the neighbourhood’s colourful past. Chef and Owner Lee Cooper is dedicated to highlighting the finer points of eating and drinking in L’Abattoir’s informed but informal setting. Service is expertly orchestrated to be unpretentious yet refined. The French influenced West Coast fare is paired with an eclectic wine program and innovative cocktail list to offer a truly unique dining experience.
Stay tuned for more of our review coming soon.
FARMER'S APPRENTICE
1535 West 6th Avenue, Vancouver, BC
A seasonally inspired, ecologically focused masterpiece of the culinary arts, Farmer's Apprentice offers set menus for both herbivore and omnivore palates. Plates change routinely to reflect the ebb and flow of local agriculture, as well as to illustrate what daily inspiration the award-winning kitchen has drawn from. Sourcing entirely from "artisan growers" and local agronomists, Farmer's Apprentice is a global leader in sustainability. Supporting tens of avant-garde, family-owned farms within the Lower Mainland, this fairytale-esque room showcases the art of locavore cuisine like no other.
Stay tuned for our review coming soon.
ANNALENA
1809 West 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC
Michael Robbins named his restaurant for his two grandmothers, Anna and Lena. If either of them ever told him not to play with his food, it doesn’t show. AnnaLena’s long black and white Kitsilano room is decorated with the chef’s own painted Bearbrick teddy figurines and sentimental Lego constructions, like a red heart he built his wife for Valentine’s Day. How refreshing to find a chef exhibiting a personal passion for something other than bare Edison filament bulbs. Robbins’ real toys are in the kitchen. The octopus and potato dish features tentacles cooked sous-vide and then grilled, while the tiny suckers are detached, pickled and accentuated with little pastry-bag dots of lobster mayonnaise.
Stay tuned for our review coming soon.
OSTERIA SAVIO VOLPE
615 Kingsway Street, Vancouver, BC
Savio Volpe is a restaurant styled after the classic osteria–rustic fare in the Italian tradition of freshness and regionality, using groceries gathered in the nearby lakes, oceans, farms and fields. Everything is prepared in the simplest, most flavourful way; pasta is handmade fresh every day–fatto a mano in casa–and meat, poultry and fish are kissed by smoke over the wood-fired grill and rotisserie. And of course, a long list of friendly Italian wines and old world coffee to inspire conversation and good cheer among friends, family and strangers alike. Above all else, Savio celebrates liveliness, warmth and hospitality.
Stay tuned for more of our review coming soon.
THE ACORN
3995 Main Street, Vancouver, BC
TThe Acorn is an award-winning, vegetable-forward restaurant and bar located at the heart of Vancouver’s Main St. It is a destination for diners seeking the best and most creative meals made from fresh, locally sourced ingredients. Carefully crafted dishes cater to vegans and gluten free diners while ensuring that even the staunchest meat eaters leave fully satisfied.
Stay tuned for our review coming soon.
BURDOCK & CO
2702 Main Street, Vancouver, BC
Andrea Carlson is chef and owner of Burdock & Co which she opened in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in 2013. Their philosophy is guided by principles of sourcing and recognizing that they are of a place. Located in the Canadian Pacific Northwest: a tangle of islands, coastlines, and deltas; a convergence of valleys and urban gardens. The food is a natural abundance of ingredients cared for by growers, farmers and foragers–a way of cooking that trusts the raw material to shine. They seek out wines that are produced with values that match their own, respect for the land, artisanal techniques, and no unnatural additives.
Stay tuned for our review coming soon.
BOTANIST
1038 Canada Place, Vancouver, BC
Botanist is the newest addition to Vancouver's vibrant culinary scene, inspired by the principles of botany. Designed by award-winning agencies Ste Marie Design & Glasfurd & Walker, the space has been layered with the elements of a destination abundant in natural beauty, featuring a bar, an outdoor terrace garden, vibrant dining room, and lounge. The garden invites guests to linger in a glass-walled space filled with greenery, a trellis, and more than 50 different types of plant species.
Stay tuned for our review coming soon.