My wife wanted to return to Granville Island which wasn’t a problem with me. We debarked the Hop On Hop Off bus at the Vancouver Aquatics Center and took a short Aqua Ferry to the “island”. My wife and daughter were indecisive about where to eat lunch. I reminded them about “Edible Canada” and that ended up being our destination.
From reading reviews of Edible Canada, I thought it was a specialty grocery store that also prepared food. After popping the door open, we quickly realized that it was quite the opposite. It was a bustling restaurant filled with diners and servers.
A number of items on their menu appealed to me: Yukon Artic Char Gravlax, Thai Style Fraser Valley Chicken Wings, Farmers Harvest with choice of BC salmon, smoked sturgeon or flank steak, West Coast Banh Mi, etc. Since I was in Canada, I decided to order the national bar food dish – poutine. What made theirs unique was that they included pulled pork and duck fat fries.
My wife ordered the BBBB Burger: chopped brisket, short rib and beef chuck patty, bourbon bacon jam, biota mustard, arugula and tomato. I had a small taste of it and I agree that was a delicious burger. They could have added another “B” to the name because it was served on a brioche bun.
The choice of avocado toast by my daughter surprised me. She did like the dish, but eventually scraped off the poached eggs because she doesn’t like to eat egg yolks. My poutine was served in a mini iron cast fry pan. I loved the crispiness of the fries. The pulled pork was tender and the brown gravy that topped the dish was delicious. I can see why this is a popular dish in Canada because it really warmed me up inside.
After we finished our lunch, we cruised through the grocery section of the restaurant. While there were several local items that appealed to us, common sense hit home: we had no space left in our luggage nor our carry on bags.
What surprised me is that there seemed to be a lot of locals dining at Edible Canada. I assumed that Granville Island was a tourist trap and that it would be filled with tourists. While there were a lot of tourists milling about, I think most of them were inside the Public Market.
After that we made our way back to where we stored out luggage and took a taxi back towards the airport. We managed to squeeze in some time to meet up with one of my wife’s friends that resides near the airport and enjoyed the conversation. If you book an Alaskan cruise, you definitely have to add additional time to tour Vancouver. It is definitely worth it.
