Jojo Jajangmyeon, Mount Tolmie, Victoria

In the variety of shops near my house is a parade of store fronts that used to house the Fired Up paint your own ceramics centre.  I never visited it, because I felt no need to paint my own plates.  The stripey ones I got from Zellers do me just fine.  And cost me much less, even if they do appear in many different kitchens around Canada and the rest of the world.    I have now visited its replacement.  The K-Pub "Jojo Jajangmyeon".

Note first that the Urbanspoon entry has a spelling error in it.  Jajangmyeon is, according to my research, a dish of thick wheat noodles in a soy bean paste sauce.  I am not sure who JoJo is, but they obviously are proud of this dish. So they named their restaurant after it. And myself and the Brunette of my Acquaintance headed there one quiet and raining Saturday night.

Inside, this is a lovely-looking place.  Aesthetically, its got clean modern lines, in the big tables, high backed chairs, the thin dividers and lots of perpendicular lines. There's subtle lights around the bar area pikcing it out as the central focal point, though this is ruined by the flat panel TV above it. Korean (I assume) music plays in the background, not loud enough to interrupt your conversation, but enough to stop you hearing your neighbours talk.

The style is similar to many of the Asian-fusion eateries in town, but it feels like it came from the iPad generation.  Though, that might be the iPads on every table.  On which one orders.  There are two or three sliding doors on one wall which lead to more intimate rooms for groups, and the two front of house staff are left to prep drinks and bring out food from the kitchen.

The menu was limited as they had just re-opened (*).  But there was enough on their to choose a feast from.  Plus I love playing with technology, though I am sure the Brunette would have preferred me to engage in polite conversation.  And the downside of a menu on an ipad... no-ome comes around that you can ask awkward question about the contents of their dishes (everything seems to contain ground pork, by the way).

But we did get the helpful lady over to tell us about the food, and ordered up... no Jajangmyeon, but a seafood Pajeon, white kimchi, rice, and a soft tofu hot pot.  The Pajeon is a large pancake made from egg, wheat flour and rice flour, mixed in with green onions and in this case all sorts of fishy goodness.  Shrimp, calamari, possibly octopus and other shellfish.  It was rich dish, that filled me up a little too far by the end of the meal.  But very moreish.  Easily shared amongst 3-4 less hungry individuals.

The soft tofu hot pot was great.  A spicy, sauce with tofu that had the consistency of a soft poached egg white. And little bits of ground pork. So don't be thinking this is a vegetarian dish.  Really warming on a wet day.  And the white kimchi accompanied it well.  This is pickled cabbage that's not been smothered in a chilli sauce, so it has the damp, acidic crunch but with none of the heat.

It being a Korean-style pub, we ordered beer and sake to go with it.  I got a Black Crown Bud.  Mostly as I had not seen it served anywhere (though that has a lot to do with me only looking at the craft beer normally, and not playing with an iPad to look at every option).  It didn't blow my socks off, but a cold beer with more colour and malt than standard Budweiser, it went very well with this meal.  The Brunette got some warm sake, which was much enjoyed.  I sipped it, and think I prefer my sake cold.  Not that either way is 'traditional', as some foodies will tell you in the more snobby moments.  Drink it how you like it.

Other things on the menu were piles and piles of chicken pieces that were available in massive party platters (several of which disappeared into one of the side rooms). There was a couple of noodle dishes and a Bibimbap.  And that was pretty much it.  Prices were good (we had more than enough food and a drink each for $44). I'd heard quotes of 25-30 dollar dishes, but none of those were on this menu.

I may well go back, even though I can go to Pho-Ever as well for Korean-style food.  I like the ambience, I liked the food, and really should try the signature dish sometime.



(*) The one worrying part about them just re-opening comes from their facebook page.  A Mr Adams of the CRD Environmental Health board wanted to know when the 'clean out' had taken place from their last inspection.  The day before we visited it appears.  I could read a lot into this, but right now the place is still open, so hopefully this all past them.

Poutine 66, Quadra Village, Victoria

Recently, I was trying to sell my old car, as I had replaced it with a slightly newer and much lower mileage model.  This is not a metaphor.  The new car will do me many years of service, as had the lovely British Racing Green one. But for some reason the rest of the world hadn't understood how simple awesome my old car was.  One of my best friends offered to re-write my Used Victoria ad, in return for poutine when the car sold.

Well, it finally sold at the end of February, to a car enthusiast whose very happy to race around in it and give the extra love and care it needs.  And my friend got her poutine dinner.

In Victoria, the Daddy of Poutine is La Belle Patate in Esquimalt.  It's been described as the best poutine west of Montreal by one emigrant from Montreal. It's grungy, it's out of the way, but serves piping hot tubs of gravy laden cheese curds and fries that warm your belly and make you feel alive.  I highly recommend taking it out to eat at Saxe Point at watching the cruise ships go by, and realizing that life is damn wonderful.

But, I'd seen somewhere a link to Poutine 66 in Quadra village, and convinced my friend to try somewhere new.  We took the short drive there from down town (in the new wheels) and dove into the store before anything bad could happen.  I don't know why, but Quadra village has this reputation for being sketchy.  I've lived in London... it's possibly less sketchy than most of that city, but for Victoria, I suppose it's just a little worn.  Or real, as you could define it.

I digress.  Food.  You can get Poutine. Or poutine with extras.  I got the Montreal Smoked poutine, in regular size for under $10.  Big fries, lashing of gravy, chunky cubes of salty beef and big fat peas, with a bit of friend onion chucked in for good measure.  All with that all important handful of cheese curds.  Melting into a gooey mess around the potatoes and merging into the gravy.  It's not for your diet.  It's central heating and comfort food. It was bloody great, except that certain 'squeak' of the curds just was not quite there.

My friend had the original recipe.  Gravy, curds, fries.  Same fantastic flavour and consistency, less salty and also missing the 'squeak'.  If it wasn't for that little detail, this would be 10/10 and mean a trip to Esquimalt was less necessary for poutine.  Instead, for quantity and value, it is one mark shy of perfect.  Seriously will consider it again when I need to comfort food pig out (and I'm out of baked beans on toast at home), but not quite enough to tell people 'you HAVE to go there'.

Pescatores, Downtown Victoria

Saturday night, and I have a pair of tickets to see the next part in the Hobbit Trilogy at the IMAX.  The IMAX yearly pass is one of the best values in Victoria.  Free documentaries, and $5 hollywood films.  So, you don't get many Hollywood films, but they are always the big ones that make sense to watch on the massive screen in face melting detail.

But before a film, a dinner.  It's Dine Around Victoria still and I'd like to take the Brunette of my Acquaintance out.  And I've never been to Pescatores, which is meant to be a fine place for a date night.  So I book through OpenTable and we trot down town for an early meal.

We head down past the oyster into a nice lit (low and gentle, but not dark) wood and plaster room.  It's nicely laid out, with giant fans lazily rotating on the roof, big prints on the walls which are vaguely cubist.  I am sure the Brunette could tell me the exact style or artist.  Big blocky, shapes of large colour showing abstracted figures.  Anyways, I liked the ambiance.  And the big columns of fish tanks, one of which we were sat next to.

We scanned both the $30 and $40 menu, the Cioppino jumped out at both of us.  It promised a pile of west coast sea food in an Italian style stew.  It's meant to be great here, so of we went on the $30 menu.  The starter I ordered was the Calamari.   Unispiring, tastleless squid. Lightly coated in a crispy coating, but there was no flavour to the meat, or the coating.  Just the tomato and olive paste to rescue it.  Just really average.  The salmon salad I tasted on my companions plate was excellent.  Well smoked fish, with a sparky lemon vingarette rounded out by the salad leaves.  My rabbit DNA approved of the greens.  But I lost the first round.

The drink menu had been perused, and I couldn't find a decent beer to go with my meal.  I like something hoppy with most food, or a really crisp clean lager.  And Coors doesn't count.  Struck out there, but stuck to the water (which was kept well topped up all through the meal).  But a great white wine was found to pair with the Cioppino, and the Brunette was very much in heaven with the grapefruity, citrus wine she got.  I'm afraid I just don't like wine very much, so the name has escaped me, but it was good.

The stew resurrected the meal. No beer was needed to lift this meal up.  A steaming pile of fish and shellfish arrived, swimming in a tomato/wine stock.  A thick stock, but not so it over powered the fish.  We had lumps of white fish, pieces of crab and scallops, and some tasty morsels of salmon.  All merged and combined together to make a fantastic medley of flavours and textures.

Dessert nailed it for me.  A huge slice of cheesecake, topped with a salted caramel milk sauce.  A dense filling with the right mix of savoury in with the oh-so-sweet base and sauce.  I had to defend it from the attacking fork of my companion.  She was (rightly) disappointed by the tiramasu which was a bland, wobbly white sponge lump.  We almost fell out over my insistence that the cheesecake was mine, which was seen as a most selfish position to take over a dessert.  But just the one ring, it was MY PRECIOUS.  Even if it didn't make me invisible.  It was just that good.

But a calamitous argument was avoided in the restaurant, and we left as friends (and I guess I will just have to take her out for cheesecake).  Full and mostly happy stomachs, good company with a good meal at a fair price.

Zambri's, Victoria

I first ate in Zambri's when they ran out of space next to London Drugs in the Harris Green strip mall.  Bare bones set up selling authentic Italian food.  The only ornamentation I recall was tins of tomatoes stacked up in one corner.  Like hundreds of catering sized tins of real Italian tomatoes.  The food was good, and the prices reasonable, and it was good enough to take my folks to once.  And good enough they'd  would have gone back again had we had time on that trip.

Then they moved into the BC ferries building, swanked the joint up and I've been there once for brunch since.  So, dine around came up, and instead of going to a Chinese joint I'd never heard of but wanted to try, we ended up in Zambri's.  My fellow challenge blogger doesn't like Chinese food, and does like the new surroundings a Z's. Meanwhile, the gorgeous Brunette of My Acquaintance doesn't like Zambri's(*), so I could try it out and see what I thought now they'd moved.

Firstly, the place is a lot more open.  Three sides are glass, one looking out on the excitement of Yates and Blanshard.  Not the best view in the world, but it's better than the backside of a drugstore.  The bar looks amazing, with a fine array of aperitifs, sodas and liquers.  The barman rustled up me a non-alcoholic cocktail, with blood orange and bitters.  And it was excellent.  Bitter, sweet, a veritable symphony.

As luck would have it, there was two options for starter, pasta and mains on the dine around $40, and we both wanted different things.  So we could cover the whole shebang and give an honest review.  Of course, Dine Around is now over, so these things may not be available, but it gives you an idea of what to expect.

Starters I had the Palotte : little fried dumplings on a sea of rich tomato sauce.  The dumplings were dense, roughly textured morsels that drank up the sauce.  A sauce that I believe is a super simple recipe of olive oil, garlic, tins of tomatoes (I assume they still have left overs from the old place) and a long simmer on the stove.  Super simple, super flavourful.  Got things started right.  Andrea went for the Tonnato.

I've never heard of it before (minus street cred, I'm sure). Pork loin cover in a tuna mayonnaise.  It tasted... okay.  We thought some sort of tahini or chickpea was involved in the sauce. Not tuna.  It however looked incredibly unappetizing.  Thin (and not quite cold enough) slices of meat covered in a shiny beige sauce.  The words I used to describe it afterwards was 'cat vomit'.  Unfair, perhaps, but there we go. I asked Andrea for some quotes for this article and she said this about the starter: 'it was tasty but unexpected, cold when I wanted warm, chickpea flavour when I wanted anything but chickpea.... I've had way better food there than that'. 

Moving swiftly onwards... pasta.  For everything bad I can say about the tonatto, let me say the Braised kale and sausage pasta was incredible.  It had the rich flavour of kale, mellowed by the application of the savoury sausage and being braised in (I guess) butter.  Leaving this easy to eat dish.  Slightly salty, very savoury and married to the al dente pasta just perfectly.  The pasta had all the bite in the dish, with the sauce covering and enveloping it.  Really good.  If this was on the regular menu, I'd probably be trying to go back again this month.

Andrea's Gorgonzola and Pea pasta was by comparison just good.  Zambri's were giving a good portion for your money, but this would have to be half the size for me.  The bit of the cheese was strong, contrasting well with the fresh pop of the peas, but a whole plate of this would have been too much for me.  A half portion as a warm up to meat dish (or after a salad, say) would have been just right.  The Kale and Sausage?  One bowl is not enough. Our guest review said about it 'I barely even remember it, I think it would have tasted better with kale'.

Meat course!  Starting to food fade at this point, as we both discovered our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, despite both coming fresh from a run (Andreas was probably three laps of the city after fifty reps on every machine in the gym). But, I muscled onwards and upwards into the beef strip loin.

Served again on that thick tomato sauce with a stack of potatoes, this was a thin flat cut of meat, minute grilled long enough to get a little bit of the brown crispy fat, but not long enough to toughen up. Just enough protein to rebuild my muscles from my tiny run.  The potatoes seemed a little salty to me, but the sauce was a perfect compliment to the beef.  The salmon Andrea ordered was hot, fleshy and also cooked very well.  Most of it went home with her for the next day's lunch: 'almost better reheated in the microwave'.

Dessert was Cannoli.  I have no idea what to expect (and it was the only choice) and had to look it up after the meal. It was a crispy filled and rolled wafer on a bed of black cherry and dark chocolate sauce.  I expected the filling to be like ice cream, from the look of it.  Instead it was a thick porridge like filling.  Neither hot nor cold.  No sweetness, just a mushy mouthfeel. It looked like it had bits in, but no idea what those bits were. The sauce was just not for me, as I'm not a big fan of black cherries (unsugared anyways), but it combined well with the chocolate. But that filling was disconcerting.

In summary, I had three excellent courses, and poor dessert, good service, good surroundings and good catch up with Andrea about her adventures in Qatar.   It broke my run of very average (or poor) dine around meals, and got me excited about a spot that I had forgotten.

I should mention that she got the bill for this meal, but as she's not employed by Zambri's, I don't think that is a conflict of interests.  But I will leave her with the final word: 'Honestly the meal I had there would not make me eat there again, yours on the other hand...maybe. I will eat there again because I love that place, but if that was a way to showcase their food to new people - FAIL'.  



(*) probably another whole entry, but the Brunette and I did discuss, how if your first experience of a place is bad, you are very unlikely to go back even if others rave about it, while if your first experience is good, it can take two or three bad meals before you stop going there again.

Victoria Festivals

Victoria has a metric tonne of festivals.  I am probably more aware of them than anywhere else I have lived, being a smaller city than I have lived in, with more social media in my field of view, but still it seems like an explosion this week.

First, we have Dine Around and Stay In Town.  Good way to try out some restaurants with taster menus, which means right up the balliwick of this blog.  I've been disappointed in the past by places phoning it in (Reef, Cafe Brio), but both Zambri's and Pescatores came through for me this week.  I'll follow with review later, but the sausage and kale pasta at Zambris is fantastic.  I've never done the Stay part... I have a perfectly good roof over my head that I have to pay a mortgage on... the staycation hasn't appealed enough to me.  Though, I have stayed at the Château Victoria before for a birthday night, and was most useful considering the amount of falling down juice I consumed.  My friends will happily relate the shade of green I was the next morning.

This week also saw 'Tourist in your home town'.  $12.50 plus taxes gives you a passport for a variety of deals and free entries into attractions in Victoria.  Last year I considered seeing if I could cover the whole booklet in one weekend.  I kind of forgot about it.  Maybe next year I'll try it, in service to my readers.  But half the fun of visiting your local tourist attractions for me is seeing your city through the eyes of your visiting friends and family.  Plus, it's always a zoo on these days, and shuffling through a crowded Miniature World, free or otherwise, is not much fun.

So, to add to the piles of things in town, we have the start of Victoria Beer week.  9 days promoting craft beer in Victoria and the brewing industry in British Columbia.  Lots of beer specials, tastings and talks around town.  I am a little over beer specials and one off casks, and over priced beer festivals (the Great Canadian Beer Fest gets a free pass from me).  Not because I don't like beer, but getting into the pub on a week night, early enough to get that hallowed nectar is just too hard when you work out of down town.  I'll get the more regular good stuff when I can.  On the flip side, there friends of mine will say craft beer people are the -best- people.  And there is undoubtedly good stuff being served.

Also this weekend we had the Ageless Living Expo... but I didn't visit that.  I'm  not in the market for rejuvenation products and anti-ageing technology. We get old, and no creams and mineral-algae concentrates are going to stop that.

Finally, that I know off, was Gottacon.  Victoria's premier gaming convention was in past years out at Pearkes arena and a cut-price bargain basement sort of affair, run on hubris and volunteer sweat.  I never enjoyed it, despite being a large scale board game nerd, and interested in gaming of all sorts. This year, I went to help out a friend, and the new venue has raised this event upwards to average.  Lots of gamers, lots of interaction, lots of space and at least some outward organization.  With the realization that casual computer gaming is part of the Victoria tech business, promotion of these companies to a wider (but ultimately friendly) audience seems to be something to cheer about.  We'll see if it lasts, but -real- social gaming with real interactions between people to create and explore ideas are a good thing. These connections can grow into something more... even if just fulfilling and useful for the people involved.

....

Looking at Tourism Victoria, I missed:

• Vancouver Island Bead & Jewellery Show
• Hellebore Sunday
• The Young Photographer Contest
• IdeaFest (starting tomorrow)
• Victoria Spoken Word Festival (starts Tuesday)

Coming up, the big events on my radar are:

• Victoria Fringe (22nd August - 1st September)
• Beer Fest (5-6th September)
• Rifflandia (11-14th September)

Just proving, they all seem to come in clumps...