Thursday, August 20, 2009

Three Good Restaurants

In the last few weeks I have had three very good experiences at three different restaurants, all of them outside of Victoria.

1) Captain Hardy's 7145 Market Street in Port Hardy

I recently went on a trip to Cape Scott and ate at this restaurant before and after the trip. I highly recommend that if you are in Port Hardy that you check out this restaurant.

This is a classic greasy spoon, they would be a good place to be on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. They make very good fries and they make their burger patties from meat they get ground for them. This is one of the best burgers I have had in ages I should recommend it to the Victoria Burger Blog to check it out. It was the perfect classic diner burger.

The rest of their food seems to be made with just as much attention to working with high quality but affordable ingredients. We also had a breakfast there and they were busy, they had orders flying out. I had perfect french toast. The pancakes my son had came with some very decent fresh blueberries and no one complained about anything they got.

The only possible complaint would be the coffee - but then I was not looking for barista and espresso machine. Even with the classic coffee shop coffee maker, they still had a much richer and full bodied cup of joe than you could get at Tim Hortons.

2) Silver Water Cafe 237 Taylor Street in Port Townsend

Recently Sheila and I went down to Seattle for a couple of days. We caught the Coho at 3 pm from Victoria and put into Port Angeles just around dinner time. I wanted us to eat somewhere decent and reasonable and not a chain like Applebees. I knew Port Townsend is a cool town with an interesting core of the city. I thought there might be a good place to go there. We used the Urban Spoon app on the iPhone to look for somewhere to go and quickly found a likely place in the Silver Water Cafe.

We had to drive a bit longer than we wanted to and arrived for a dinner a little bit later than Max would have liked. It was worth the 20 minutes of Max complaining to go this place.

Where to I start? It is located in a wonderfully restored Victorian building in the core of Port Townsend. It is casual in atmosphere and price but seriously up market when it comes to the food.

The staff are friendly and attentive even when it gets busy. The place was packed shortly after we arrived and people were standing in line for 30 minutes to get a table on a Monday night. I can not imagine what it would like to here on a Friday or Saturday night.

The menu is long which normally sets off alarms in my head, it is hard for large menu to be done well with fresh ingredients. My fears were quickly eased when the waiter told us a number of things we not available.

We started with the Asian Seared Green Beans, I had expected something like edamame, but instead they were the classic green bean with some wonderful Asian flavours.

I highly recommend their seafood selections. I had the Cioppino, an Italian fish stew, and it was full of seafood and had a tomato broth that I could not stop eating.

So often a good restaurant will bring in their deserts and I simply find that lazy and a bad way to the end the meal. Silver Water Cafe makes all their deserts on site each day and they run out of stuff soon. We were on the early end of dinner service and they were already out of many things. Sheila had the key lime pie and I had the crumbe-topped Amaretto peach pie - both of them were excellent.

I will be going back to this restaurant any time I am passing close to Port Townsend.

Silverwater Cafe on Urbanspoon

3) Poppy 622 Broadway East Seattle ( I have to help my son, I will finish this soon)

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