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Aqua Riva, 200 Granville Street Vancouver BC (entrance at the foot of Howe St)


200 Granville Street Vancouver BC (entrance at the foot of Howe St)

(604) 683 5599

Lovely big room, we got a table by the window with a great view overlooking the Burrard Inlet. Good service, excellent selection of local beers, including a sampler of 3 beers for $5.75, prices not bad for central Vancouver, very long menu to choose from. They bring a good basket of bread, plus whipped butter (a veritable craze on the West Coast at the moment). L's starter of Alaska Black Cod blinis in a curry sauce tasted as good as they looked, but my wood grilled scallops, asparagus and salad was marred by the asparagus being dried out, and the vegetables chosen more for their appearance than taste or texture. Fried potato cubes, long ribbons of raw carrot and courgette mixed with tired salad leaves from one of those mixed bags - the raddicchio was brown round the edges. Looked lovely, failed completely in the mouth. Our mains (Salmon for L., Arctic Char for me) each arrived with virtually the same vegetables as my starter and an identical sauce. On the way out, we watched the production line: a long open plan grill and food prep area, and saw meals being assembled very prettily, very quickly and very similarly. Reminded me of something, somewhere...Oh yes! MacDonalds. The bill came to $40 a head - about 18 quid. If there weren't so many other really good places in Vancouver, I'd say OK, but this city is up to it's armpits in excellent VFM eateries, so Rejected. DM 2001