Coast Restaurant – Pretentious Menus?

On a rare occasion that we found ourselves downtown (traffic and parking is h-e-double-hockey-sticks down there), we stopped by Coast Restaurant for lunch.  We’ve dined here before for dinner and liked the seafood so thought this was a no-brainer.  It gets rather busy (and loud) in this restaurant during lunchtime as many suits fill up most of the tables so it’s a good idea to come early. 

Now, bear with me for a brief moment while I go off on a random rant about their menus… in my best Chandler Bing voice, “Could they not find a bigger menu?”  Seriously, their menu is about the same size as the table itself which makes it difficult to hold, let alone read.  I actually wound up knocking over the wine menu that was on the table.  Personally, I just thought it was a bit pretentious.

Okay, now back to the food.  We started out with the St. Tropez Mussels and Frites.  It comes with tons of double smoked bacon bits in a pernod cream sauce with shallots.  In hindsight, we might have preferred a different mussel dish because the double smoked bacon bits tended to make this dish a lot saltier than I preferred.  The mussels weren’t as plump or as tasty as the ones at The Teahouse, but they were okay.

Now that I think about it, most of the dishes seemed to be a little too salty.  The frites that comes with the mussels (which are also the same fries that come with the fish and chips) were fairly salty and comes with an unspectacular mayo dip.

While you can order a number of box lunches (including fish and chips), I decided to get the regular sized Halibut Fish and Chips.  I’m a bit picky when it comes to cole slaw and didn’t find their cole slaw to be that great.  The large piece of halibut was pretty good but not as good as the fish and chips that we had at either The Sandbar Seafood Restaurant or Dockside Restaurant down in Granville Island.

The Oyster Box comes with Fries, Smoked Fish Chowder, Caesar Salad, and an Oyster Po’ Boy Sandwich.  The chowder was okay but the Caesar didn’t seem to be garlicky enough and strangely came with a full strip of bacon sticking out of it (as opposed to being cut up and mixed in the salad).  The Po’ Boy was pretty good with 2 rather large oysters in the sandwich.

The service started out pretty good but seemed to die down as the restaurant got busier during the lunch rush.  In the beginning, our water glasses were being refilled almost as soon as we took a sip.  Later on, we noticed that a table that had just sat down beside us hadn’t been waited on for a while.  One of the female hostesses must have noticed too because we could see her reaming out a bunch of the waiters for not serving the table.

Food:  4 / 5
Service:  4 / 5

1054 Alberni Street
Vancouver, BC

www.coastrestaurant.ca

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