A steak house with sushi on the side
Best crab cake ever, but Wagyu burger anything but heavenly
You might wonder who Victor is upon entering the handsome dining room bearing his name. The name is an ode to the formidable Queen Victoria. She might well be tut tutting in the afterlife. Why Victor and not Victoria? Steak houses are macho, for sure, but I can see her attacking a porter house and demanding the name be corrected.
But Victor operator Kim Canteenwalla says the name’s also a play on ‘to the victor belong the spoils,’ “with the fork and knives in your hands scenario.”
The steak house, with a sushi and seafood bar that holds its own, is one of eight restaurants and bars at the Parq Vancouver complex; it opened last December and when I visited on a Tuesday evening, it was packed, impressive given the size of the dining room (seats about 178).
You approach the sixth floor restaurant via a rooftop terrace with pool and the B.C. Place roof in its colourifics, looming over it. In summer, it’ll make for a gorgeous patio.
The entrance is stop-in-yourtracks edgy with wallpaper of bees, wreathes and what looks like dripping blood on a repeat pattern. Steak houses tend not to be punk. Inside, it’s back to conservative with dark woods, stones, tufted sofa seats and a pretty spectacular floor to ceiling view of downtown to the south. Lighting is dim and we, as well as two couples near us, used iPhone flashlights to read the menu. Dim diminishes not only eyesight but the look of food and Instagram moments. We’d made a last minute decision to go and so were seated by the bathrooms, which, by the way, are pretty spiffy individual stalls. For an expensive restaurant, the acoustics aren’t great. At least turn down the pop music, I muttered.
Canteenwalla, who made a name
for himself in Las Vegas with wife Elizabeth Blau, oversees the eight Parq Vancouver food and drink establishments and has restaurant chefs running each. At Victor, chef Valerio Pescetelli came from Rogers Arena’s Centre Ice Grill; he’s cooked in South America, Florida and in London at Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill, “the only Michelin Star restaurant doing 250 covers a day,” he says.
Pescetelli is mad about his infrared broiler that heats steaks to 1200 F caramelizing and charring the exterior with an even sheet of heat for very uniform cooking. “It’s a real balance developing the crust and keeping the interior moist,” he says.
It’s a steak house so it’s expensive with $27 to $60 price points ($160 for the ‘show stopper’ 50-ounce tomahawk) for steak mains. Other mains run from $24 to $42.
My food experience was uneven. It began with the best crab cake ever ($20), shaped tall and statuesque in a ring mould. It was loaded with crab, had a crisp top and came with a light curry aioli. There was so little binder, it took one fork stab to fell it into a crab pile. I happily switched to chopsticks.
Those chopsticks were meant for the Nobu style hamachi (tuna) with yuzu soy sauce and serrano ($17) from the seafood bar. Wow, I thought, if this be an example of the seafood and sushi, I’m impressed.
A 12-ounce striploin ($37), a midrange cut, atop chimichurri sauce, looked lonesome with a couple of charred peppers (sides are separate) and I could see the infrared
broiler had done its job caramelizing the entire surface and leaving a juicy interior. Charred broccolini ($9) completed it.
The rest of the meal took a downturn. A Wagyu burger ($24) should have been heavenly but it was an unholy mess. The meat, almost two inches thick, was tasty but the burger was impossible to eat as a handheld, especially as the bottom bun quickly became soggy. The taleggio cheese was nice but I didn’t see much of the caramelized onions and
a black truffle dressing was meek. I ate the patty with knife and fork and some of the chimichurri sauce that came with the steak. The beauty of a burger is to bite into everything at once. The house fries, however, were good.
Other dishes? Canteenwalla says the mac and cheese waffle “is blowing people’s minds.” The togarashi spiced bluefin tuna on a Himalayan salt block with ponzu daikon sauce is a big seller as well. “We’re getting requests to do it with Wagyu beef,” he says.
The desserts we tried needed tweaks. Sticky hot fingers whiskey cake sounded too good to be true but in reality, it was a spice cake with a stingy amount of whisky sauce on the side, hardly enough to get fingers sticky. More whiskey sauce and it could have been a contender. Toasted maple semifreddo with shaved milk chocolate had the texture of thick whipped cream than a frozen dessert. Had it not made it to the freezer?
The wine list, strong on California cab sauvs, is impressive but pricey with few choices for the budget-minded. The Enomatic wine preserver allows for samplings of fine wines but be prepared to drop $62 on a six-ouncer of Mission Hill Oculus.