First Weekend In Van – Yes We Ate All Of The Food
- Kelly McKenna
- Apr 26, 2019
- 2 min read
Our first weekend in Vancouver was filled with fighting jet-lag, exploring our neighbourhood and discovering our first ‘favourite’ place to eat. (We’re fickle, this will change).
We also spent time learning the lingo and therefore went “apartment” hunting instead of flat hunting. After checking out a couple of really dingy places nearby and feeling pretty down about our prospects of finding somewhere nice to live, we found a beautiful place.
Our happiness was very short lived, however, as we realised we were just one block down from East Hasting Street. This fantastic article describes the Downtown Eastside (DTES) in much better detail than I could hope to, and it is well worth a read.
The apartment hunt continued on.
The area is gradually being gentrified and just a few minutes walk west, we were back in Vancouver’s lively Gastown neighbourhood, where we checked out Richard’s new office and of course did what we do best…
Gastown is full of highly rated places to eat and drink and we absolutely cannot wait to start making our way around it, but for now, our favourite place (to be fair to the rest of Gastown, it’s so far the only place we’ve eaten there!) is Steamworks.
Steamworks Menu, Gastown, April 2019
Steamworks has been operational in Canada since 1995 and according to their website, is the only place in Canada that has a functional steam powered brewery.
As soon as we walked through the doors, we both knew that this was a place we would visit again and again. As we walked past a table that was serving beer tasting paddles, we looked at each other and simultaneously said “paddle”. Sometimes, we just get each other 🙂
The paddle certainly did not disappoint as Steamworks is home to the #TenTapTaster.
Rich With Our #TenTapTaster, Gastown, April 2019
After ticking all of the beers we wanted to try on a pre-filled order pad for the bar (very clever idea, more tasting places should do this), it was time to consider food.
The menu looked incredible and it was very hard to resist the $49.99 ‘Expense Account Steak’ – “five peppercorn crusted 12 oz. New York striploin, prawn skewer, mushrooms, garlic toast” – yum. Perhaps we’ll save that one for when I get a job.
After agonising for a while and working our way quite merrily through our paddle, we eventually decided on the Steak and Stilton Salad (a much more reasonable $18.99) for me and the Porchetta Sandwich (lunchtime special, $16.99) for Rich. Both were truly yummy and we were more than happy with our decisions.
And with our new “favourite place” decided, we headed tipsily back out into the rain to continue our Vancouver adventures.
P.S. On Sunday we went “grocery” (really getting to grips with the words) shopping for the first time, which was both quite traumatic and relatively expensive. We did manage to see some truly Canadian baked beans and a ridiculous amount of spam though, so not a completely wasted trip!
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