Notch8 Restaurant & Bar: Dine Out 2019

Dine Out Vancouver is a food festival with over 200 participating restaurants that offer 3-course menus at different price points: $15/$25/$35/$45. It’s a fun way to try different restaurants in Vancouver that you may not normally go to.

The second Dine Out I went to was at Notch8 Restaurant & Bar, a nature-inspired Canadian cuisine restaurant inside the the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Vancouver.

Notch8 is situated in the lobby of the hotel and is quite easy to find. The space is open with giant lights in the shape of stars or spiky balls. Interiors are mostly a deep blue and turquoise with dark wooden furniture. Our table featured a sofa on one end and a velvet arm chair on the other end.

Notch8’s Dine Out 2019 $45 menu is as follows (you choose one of the following for each category):

Appetizers

We ordered one of each appetizers. The qualicum scallop was underwhelming at first glance. The plate was big and only one scallop sits on the shell in the middle. The scallop was paired with a small piece of smoked sablefish, birch infused kabayaki, torched masago miso aioli, pickled lingonberries, shishito peppers, sea asparagus and nori (seaweed) sand. It tasted like Japanese cuisine due to the pairings.

The truffle egg was quite interesting. It was paired with prosiutto, burrata cheese, roasted sunchoke, forest mushrooms and candied walnut crumb. The egg was cooked perfectly with the yolk oozing out as you cut it open with a fork or knife. The taste was savoury and rich, probably due to the truffle and mushrooms. I found the cheese and prosciutto to also help this seemingly vegetarian appetizer have more substance.

Entrees

For mains, we ordered the Golden ocean and the spruce crusted venison.

The “Golden Ocean” was some sort of a fish dish, paired with beluga lentils, mussels, wild pink scallops, chili saffron butter sauce, clam nectar and bottarga “sand”. It tasted like a sweet cod and paired great with whatever you chose to combine it with, whether it be the mussels, scallops or just the butter sauce. The lentils were interesting because I thought they were capers at first, but they taste much better than capers. In General, the sauce was a real winner for this dish. The sand was sour and I didn’t like it too much.

I never order venison because I’m not a fan of game meats, but my sister ordered it and it actually turned out to be quite tasty without that “gamey” texture. The venison was paired with smoked carrot, red fife wheat berries, mushrooms, preserved fruit mostarda, cassis and fermented black garlic jus. Again the sauce was a winner for this dish and made the venison taste more like a steak.

Dessert

For dessert there was only one choice – the chocolate cake. It was a dome cake with layers of chocolate mousse, matcha “moss” micro sponge, blackberry gelee, cocoa nib streusel and smoked birch sap ice cream.

It definitely tasted like a fine normal chocolate cake. I’m not a chocolate lover, but the layers were nicely presented and didn’t fall apart. The blackberry sauce gave it a slightly sour taste, but I liked pairing the cake with the ice cream. I don’t know if you’ve ever had “smoked birch sap” ice cream, but basically it tasted like vanilla.

Final thoughts

In general, I did enjoy the food at Notch8. I’ve heard reviews that the food is not that great. For their regular price point, I am not sure if it’s worth it. The food was nothing extraordinary but still good and the portions are very reasonable (except for that scallop appetizer). One negative point would be the service was quite slow. It took us a long time to get our bill and our server just disappeared for awhile after the main course.

Our total came to $90 before tax and tip.

Sincerely, Loewe