An East Van dinner worth crowing about
Chef ’s experiments enticing
He’s a young crouching tiger chef, short on experience and formal training, but Justin Ell is making some of the most interesting food in this city. You’ll find him at Crowbar in East Van creating well-executed, daring and original dishes. “I don’t do a lot of reading. I don’t know what’s going on outside of Crowbar. I find I focus better without distractions and influences,” he says. So much so that he’s the only one in the kitchen at this very casual spot in the vortex of cool restaurants around Kingsway and Fraser.
One of Ell’s most notable accomplishments is a sleight of hand with offal and off cuts (all organic). Diners who’d never order beef kidney or heart, sweetbread, tripe, pork blood or lamb neck are happily doing so. Both times I’ve been there the 37-seat restaurant was nearly packed during a weekday. Dishes cost anywhere from $9 into the high $20s for some of the meat and seafood.
A sustainable cooking philosophy steers Ell to use under-utilized and off cut meats, seamlessly incorporating small amounts into rustic dishes. The daily pasta, for example, has had beef kidney and heart in the sauce and another time, it was house-made tripe bacon. Diners hardly know it’s offal but once initiated, they think, hey, not bad and a door is opened to a next time. And that’s especially true when he tells
women that meats like sweetbread are really great for the skin. His pasta noodles are made fresh daily as is his delicious bread (spelt and rye the last time I visited).
Another offal dish, vitello tonnato toast with grilled sweetbreads, smoked tonnato and fermented onion was delicious, although it’s no longer on the menu. Ditto octopus ceviche with ‘spex-o’ (XO sauce made with speck instead of the usual dried shrimp and scallop), fermented shallots, and herbs was a beauty. His menu doesn’t sit still for long. Gone, too, is the pine-aged grilled hen with bacon-roasted cauliflower and fermented hot sauce. (The chicken was brined in pine oil and needle broth, then aged for 14 days.)
Speaking of aging, regulars know Ell does an off-menu Crowbar burger meat if they ask. He uses grassfed beef, aged 54 days, ground daily, with concentrated umami; it’s paired with Taleggio and hit with beef fat mayo.
“My cooking is like survivalist cuisine using what’s available at the time but accented with really luxurious artisan products like amazing olive oil and cheeses,” he says. “Aging, fermenting, and preservation techniques really have to do with my lack of storage space.”
On a recent visit, we started with grilled carrots with black (fermented) garlic bagna cauda. “Usually meat is the star but I like to elevate vegetables,” Ell says. He cooks the carrots in carrot pulp, carrot juice and fish sauce to concentrate sugars. “When I grill it, it’ll immediately char because of the sugars.
I love that sweet and savoury char with a bit of bitterness.” The anchovies in the bagna cauda add the salty layer. He likes to lavish attention on vegetables with meat or fish playing minor roles.
For a brussels sprouts dish, Ell uses beef fat and a hit of fish (smoked tuna sauce). An endive salad had carpaccio-thin slices of cured sea bream, black vinegar, chili oil, pine nuts and a hit of oil taken from his bolognese sauce.
Halibut was in season and he served it with lentils mixed with the spex-o and a drizzle of Domenica Fiore organic extra virgin olive oil, his favoured oil.
Lamb neck was braised in lemon grass, Parmigiano rind (for extra umami) and anchovy ‘tears’ (garum,
a Roman fish sauce) and served under a bed of yu choi greens. So tender and tasty!
Dessert was another Ell creation — salted burnt white chocolate and blood tart with hazelnut shell, served with a fernet Chantilly cream. “I basically burn the white chocolate until it’s deeply caramelized. It reminds me of cooking as a young person and burning things. Now I take something that was an accident and turn it into something delicious.” He used a small amount of blood instead of egg to coagulate the custard-like filling.
Should you choose, there’s also $40 and $60 tasting menus.
Ell’s inventive cooking, he’d say, comes from his science background. He worked previously at La
Quercia and Maenam. “I was pretty terrible when working for others. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have great chefs trying to teach me but I was in a difficult period of my life,” he says. “Things began to click when I looked at cooking as a science and looked at the chemistry, biology and physics of it. It’s imperative that I understand every process. If I don’t, what is the point of it?”
Cocktail and wine geeks would high-five the approach here. Owner William Johnson (a sommelier) hunts for good-value wines from lesser known regions. The wine list is eclectic and includes, for instance, a Turkish red and sizable real estate for bubblies (for which there is a sabre for a ceremonial opening!).
“Value’s a big thing,” he says. Cocktails are named after characters from ‘90s films, including Mallory Knox (Natural Born Killers) with gin, Sons of Vancouver Blue Curaçao, lemon, creamed honey, basil, sea salt, and sparkling wine. And someone at the bar really likes ciders — there are 10 locally made ciders on offer.
“My cooking is like survivalist cuisine using what’s available at the time but accented with really luxurious artisan products like amazing olive oil and cheeses.” — Justin Ell