Pidgin: Dine Out Vancouver 2025
Dine Out Vancouver is back and it is one of my favourite food festivals in Vancouver 🎉! This year it runs from January 22 – February 9, 2025 and restaurants are offering special course menus starting from $20 – $100 per person.
For my first Dine Out this year, I decided to dine at Pidgin with my husband.
Pidgin is an Asian fusion restaurant located in Gastown. We actually came here early on in our relationship to celebrate our 100 day anniversary (HAHA 💀) and we considered it one of our first fancy dinner dates. Now almost 7 years later and married, it has become a special memory for us 🥰.
Recommended: Read my very old review of Pidgin from 6+ years ago at our 100 day anniversary meal.
This year for Dine Out Vancouver, Pidgin’s menu is priced at $65 per person and includes 6 shared courses. Here is how our experience went:
Pidgin
350 Carrall St, Vancouver, BC V6B 2J3
The vibe
Pidgin is very close to East Hastings and sometimes there are people doing weird stuff on that street 🥴, so I advise you to park in Gastown and at least on the Cordova street side. We paid for street parking across the street and it costed us $8 for 2 hours.
Pidgin is not a super large restaurant but despite this, they are able to fit quite a lot of tables. Beware – you may be sitting very close to another table (i.e. you cannot even walk between your table and another). But somehow with the way sound travels in the space, you can’t really hear their conversation because the chatter and laughter kind of mutes it out.
For a table of 2, we were seated against the wall where one side is a plus booth seating and the other side is a chair. Larger tables may have a circle table with half booth and 1-2 chars, or a bench with no back support.
The lighting inside is quite dim and a lot of warm tones, giving it a romantic atmosphere but also makes it mandatory for me to adjust colour balance when editing my photos so things don’t look too orange. My skin looked amazing though 😅!
Food and drinks review ($65)
Pidgin’s Dine Out Vancouver menu is priced at $65 per person and includes 6 courses. We didn’t get any add-ons so I will not include any prices for specific dishes in the post.
One-eyed samurai ($16) + Citrine ($16)
We are currently trying to do dry January but we fail every weekend 💀. So instead, we opt for “no more hard liquor”. I was very excited to try a cocktail 😈.
My husband ordered the one-eyed samurai, which features watermelon, lemon, tequila, sake, egg white and granite. This drink was very similar to any type of “sour” cocktail due to the egg foam on top and it had a fruity and delicious taste. It was fun to mix in the slush into the drink, but it already tasted good even without it.
I ordered the citrine, which is another fruity drink with elements of citrus, lemon, ginger and sparkling wine. This one was also easy to drink but didn’t taste as good as the one-eyed samurai.
Soup – complimentary
The first item that arrived at our table were these small cups of soups, complimentary from the kitchen and technically not part of the Dine Out Vancouver menu.
It had Hokkaido peppers, ginger and I didn’t hear the rest 🙃. But upon sipping it, it was a familiar taste. It tasted like the Chinese soups or sauces you get at Chinese restaurants when you order a lobster-course dinner. It was comforting and tasted very healthy from the ginger. It had a thicker and creamier texture than Chinese soups.
First course: Snacks
The first course consists of 3 “snack” dishes:
Szechuan lamb skewer: These were pretty cute – like mini sausages on a skewer. I am not a big fan of lamb because I find it too “gamey’ so I can’t say I loved this snack but my husband likes lamb and he enjoyed the skewer. The spiced yuzu house made labneh was yummy to me and helped reduce some of that gaminess.
Humboldt squid tostada: This was my favourite item of the night 😋! The humboldt squid was cooked so perfectly – not chewy at all and had great seasoning with mango salsa and avocado. It was kind of tangy and kind of savoury, and the tostada really held its structural integrity and didn’t crumble into crumbs when I bit into it.
Onigiri: This was a pretty simple snack and is mostly seasoned seaweed and rice with an umeboshi (plum) sauce.
Second course: Miso roasted cauliflower
The next course was a veggie course but it really surprised us!
The cauliflower was roasted in miso and paired with crispy rice cake and a shiso salsa verde. The cauliflower tasted great with a hint of sweetness from the miso and some sourness from the shiso salsa verde. The crispy rice cake had a crispy exterior and soft interior, giving it some good texture.
We felt this dish was quite unique and different from other dishes we’ve tried before 😯.
Third course: Smoked steelhead
Third course is kind of a first main dish and features smoked salmon steelhead on a bed of sanshozuke potato salad.
Thank god this course has 2 pieces of salmon because the portions here are not that large. When the dish arrived, I could smell the smokiness of the steelhead. The fish was cooked perfectly with flaky and moist meat. I also liked the little bits of mustard they add.
I felt this dish really embodied the Asian fusion Pidgin is known for 👍.
Fourth course: Duck ssam
The 4th and 5th course came together but we ate the duck ssam first.
Ssam means “wraps” in Korean and in this case, we are making little duck wraps out of thinly sliced radish, side dishes (kimchi, seaweed, beansprouts) and a house made ssam sauce.
We felt the duck was delicious and paired really well with the ssam sauce. Everything together was assembled easily and well-balanced. Again, we also felt this dish was quite unique and had that fusion twist. We are used to eating regular Korean wraps like pork belly and cabbage or radish, or even Chinese peking duck wraps with duck and crepes. This was something a little different but still worked.
Fifth course: Mentaiko mazemen ramen
Lastly, we finished our meal with a carb – the mentaiko mazemen ramen. Mazemen is a “mixed noodle” in Japanese so it doesn’t have broth. It came in a pretty small bowl but still enough to share with 2 people.
The mentaiko is kind of fried, giving it some crunch and the flavours of this noodle dish also have shiso and togarashi pesto.
Overall, I think this dish was kind of boring compared to the other cool dishes we tried so far, but it did fill us up at the end.
Sixth course: Coconut rice pudding
For dessert, they served 2 bowls of a coconut rice pudding with lime and mango sorbet.
I liked the splash of flavour from the mango sorbet – has a lot of that fruitiness and flavour. The rest of the rice pudding lacked flavour if not mixed well with this mango sorbet or at least with some of those coconut flakes. So I did think this dessert was a little bland. My husband also prefers his rice pudding more soft and pudding like and found the texture to taste too similar to plain rice.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
We had an awesome dinner at Pidgin and really enjoyed their Dine Out Vancouver menu this year. Given how interesting and unique the dishes were, we feel Pidgin is deserving of 5 stars for this dinner ☺️.
We loved almost every course with the exception of the dessert and maybe the mazemen (still tasted decent). Every other dish really surprised us with fun twists on a classic Asian dish and had some really bold flavour profiles.
Portion sizes were on the smaller end but we do not mind sharing courses. I just find that my husband can definitely eat twice as much as me so I wondered if he was still hungry 🤔. We had a heavy lunch so I think he was satisfied with a lighter dinner, but mostly he was happy that each course tasted really good even if the portions are not big.
Last time we were at Pidgin, the thing that kind of ruined our experience was how long service took (almost 3 hours in total 😬). This time, the service time was much shorter and we only had to wait a bit between the salmon and the duck/mazemen course. Albeit, I bet the operations is more streamlined due to Dine Out Vancouver and pumping out the same courses to each table.
Pidgin is a special place to us because it is where we made memories early on in our relationship. Back then, we considered Pidgin one of our first fancy/expensive restaurants but now we drop $100 per person dinners without batting an eye 💸. It was funny to think about how far we have come as a foodie couple. I realize now how much our palette has expanded due to all the different dishes we’ve tried.
Thank you to the Pidgin team for a great meal and evening!
Sincerely, Loewe