Baptism by fire and water at Dachi on East Hastings
Imagine the craziness in the lead-up to opening a new restaurant. Dachi made it to opening day without major glitches back in December, and the neighbourhood was so ready to check out the old Campagnolo Roma space.
The glitch fairies did visit, however. “We had a flood and a fire,” exuberant co-owner Miki Ellis says.
“I was at the bank on the first official day and got a phone call. Stephen (Whiteside, another owner) had just gotten in and it was raining into our kitchen. It was flooded. The tenants had left the water running in their sink apparently, and it was leaking down like a big rainfall into our kitchen.”
The day ended with a guest knocking over a candle and setting a napkin on fire upon getting up to leave.
“That’s when we found out the napkins were completely flammable.” (I, too, was once a candlelight arsonist and set a gigantic menu on fire.)
The room has been updated and simplified since the Campagnolo days, but the bones remain the same. When I visited Dachi a few weeks in, service was as smooth and as attentive as at a high-end spot. That’s because Ellis and Whiteside, working front of house, spent a lot of years at the impressive Aburi Group who operate Miku in Vancouver and Toronto as well as Minami and Gyoza Bar in Vancouver. (Ellis was a sake sommelier and Whiteside was the wine guy.)
It’s an adjustment for Ellis, who’s accustomed to reservations in the hundreds. Her gut gets anxious over the smaller numbers.
“But it’s the whole reason we wanted to do it. We get to chat and get to know people,” she says.
This restaurant has a Japanese name because Ellis has part Japanese ancestry; Dachi is a colloquial word for friend. The name choice was a showdown between Dachi and Mucker, the Irish word for mate.
“I won the argument. I thought mucker rhymed with something I’d rather it not,” laughs Ellis.
Third partner Tyson Vitechuk is the chef. He’d been at Coquille and Chill Winston before jumping into the ownership fray.
“We wanted to keep the food simple and comfortable for the neighbourhood,” Ellis says. “I don’t want to use the word elevated. It’s nothing fancy. It’s about ingredients and who we’re working with.”
The wine and food menu is compact but both components will be changing regularly.
A cheddar and buttermilk biscuit ($7) had a crisp exterior and flaky loft inside. Nice! I’d have preferred butter to the apple sauce, however.
Yarrow Meadows duck confit croquettes ($10) came with a smoked golden raisin purée and pickled celery, so the food has its elevated moments. The croquettes were pretty much all shredded duck.
Baked Desolation Sound
oysters ($19), five to a plate, were topped with toasted seaweed butter and sourdough crumb and lightly, lightly baked. They still had an oceany taste.
Country fried steelhead trout ($22) arrived with beets baked under a salt crust and horseradish gribiche (mayostyle sauce with cooked egg yolk).
“The beets retain a little more earthiness baked under salt,” Vitechuk says, “and the natural sweetness is concentrated.”
A 24-hour roasted beef chuck flat with brussels sprouts, black garlic and spaetzle ($27) was a hearty cold weather dish. The meat was very tender.
The desserts didn’t impress, mostly because of sloppy presentations. The main acts were buried under sauces and accents.
A chocolate ganache, more of a mousse lightened with tofu, was delicious but asphyxiated under pear vanilla purée, hazelnut streusel and dollops of soft meringue. I thought poached granny smith apple would be a simple but delicious damsel, like poached pear, with maybe some Chantilly cream on the side. But the chopped apple, along with cubes of spice cake, were buried under cider sabayon and ginger mascarpone. The apples barely spoke.
The wine list, though not static, had a lot of biodynamic and natural and unique bottles. My Le P’tit Blanc du Tue- Boeuf, a white, claimed to be able to “kill beef” and so it did, standing up to the roasted chuck flat quite handily.
If you’re curious about how sake can work with western foods, Ellis would love to shower customers with her knowledge.
“I’ll take them down the rabbit hole,” she says.
“We wanted to keep the food simple and comfortable for the neighbourhood.”
Miki Ellis