Botanist dining: Food art in Vancouver

We celebrated our 6-month anniversary at Botanist, an upscale restaurant in downtown Vancouver that boasts food art. Their menu is pacific-northwest based and their space is beautifully designed with lots of greenery and marble accents.

The inside had dim lighting and romantic ambience for dinnertime, but for brunch & lunchtime it is brightly lit.

Both of us ordered 3 courses, one from “Graze” (appetizer), “Hook, Hunt & Harvest” (mains), and dessert, which is not disclosed until the end of the main meal.

Bread + Graze

Botanist’s fougasse bread is served first at every table. They are baked in-house into a pretty leaf design. You can also buy some to go for $8.

For appetizers, we ordered the pan-seared scallops ($22) and the hand-cut tagliatelle ($20).

The scallops was accompanied by red onion, apple, peas and guanciale, madeira jus (fancy stuff that I have no idea about). It was a unique dish mostly because of the apple, which gave it a nice sweet and tart flavour.

The tagliatelle came with mushrooms and a crispy piave, which is basically a nice crispy piece of fancy cheese. For a non-meat dish, the tagliatelle was very satisfying and I always appreciate a good mushroom dish. I feel like the tagliatelle can even be a main by itself.

Hook, Hunt & Harvest

For the mains we ordered the butter poached lobster ($56) and the dry-aged strip loin ($49).

The lobster was easy to eat and the butter sauce was very creamy. The squash and fennel was decorative, cut into very thin and wispy pieces. The most interesting part of this dish was the lobster mousse cannelloni, which is a cannelloni (type of pasta) with lobster meat stuffed inside.

The strip loin came pretty standard. I’m not a big steak lover so I can’t tell the difference between good steak and a better steak. In the end all I can say is that it’s a good steak. The most unique part of this dish was the
potato pavé. From the photo, the rectangle block looks like one big chunk of potato, but it’s actually compiled of many thin slices of potato that you can easily tear apart to eat with your steak.

Dessert

For dessert, we ordered the esmeralda cremeux ($12) and the chocolate porter cake ($12).

The esmeralda cremeux was very lovely. It looked like a little anime forest to me with an apricot sorbet (who knew apricot tastes good?) on top of a
cocoa tuile, which is the chocolate tube thing you see in the photo below. Inside featured nib brittle, kind of a chocolate nutty thing, strawberries and pistachio sponge cake.

The porter cake wasn’t that interesting to me – it tasted and looked like a deconstructed s’mores. I also didn’t like the taste of the root beer chantilly.

Final thoughts

I enjoyed dining at the Botanist. The experience itself was very nice and I felt like they never rushed you to order or finish eating. They replace your cutlery after every course which felt both luxurious and also unnecessary at the same time, but I don’t often do fine dining so what do I know.

The food in general was delicious, of course, and in every dish there did seem to be some sort of a special twist that made the dish unique. The presentation of each dish was beautiful and their menu changes seasonally, which is nice.

Our total came to $171 before tax and tip and we were both full and happy. I would definitely recommend for you to try the Botanist at least once if you are looking to try some more unique dishes and appreciate food aesthetics.

Sincerely, Loewe