Big step up from coffee and desserts
Menu at Bows and Arrows puts emphasis on quality ingredients
Sometimes I walk into a room and suddenly feel freshly showered and laundered. Bows and Arrows is like that — natural light washes over you and the white walls, wood furnishings (including a gorgeous 26-foot fir table) and great music floats you to a Zen place.
It’s always been a great spot for serious coffee and dessert, but a few months ago, it started flexing muscle, hiring a serious chef.
Like most chefs, Kris Barnholden has been on the move. In Vancouver, he’s done pastries and chocolates at Chocolate Arts, cooked at Parkside and Lucy Mae Brown (both gone), ran Mis Trucos and Le Tab (also both gone), and cooked in Toronto at Ursa and in Montreal at Bronte (again, both gone).
He’s also cooked at Chez Bruce in London and Blue Hill at Stone Barns outside New York.
Le Tab, Barnholden said, was the Chinook word for “the table,” and lent to the idea of Vancouver’s mash-up of cultures. There he unleashed his creative mind with dishes like puréed pumpkin and celery root masquerading in egg yolk and egg white trompe l’oeil.
Dishes required solid techniques (including fermenting, curing, pickling, smoking), but proved challenging for a city that loves its predictable chain restaurants. He closed Le Tab in February. At Bows and Arrows, he and owners Drew Johnson and Nate Sabine (who started as coffee roasters in Victoria) are driven by quality ingredients, ethical sourcing, and good value.
“We have similar philosophies about sourcing — knowing where food comes from and its traceability,” says Barnholden.
When I went for dinner (they offer breakfast and lunch, as well), it started with an order of house-made bread ($3), which can be problematic — when it’s good, I eat too much of it. Which I did.
A squash and apple tartine with cashew cheese over sourdough bread ($7) added even more bread to my meal. The dish is a vegan favourite, wholesome and delicious.
Smoked lamb ribs ($9 for three detached ribs) glistened with a peach glaze and puffed rice added a touch of crunch. Nicely done, considering the kitchen lacks a ventilation system and thus, no grilling or frying. There’s a smoker outdoors so the lamb inhaled smoke.
I wanted to suck on the lamb bones like lollipops.
Lobster mushroom rice with soy egg yolk ($15) sent me on a lobster hunt and I came up empty. Not surprising when it’s lobster mushrooms, not lobster and mushrooms in the dish.
The egg yolk is cured in soy sauce, which firms and enriches. The rice is cooked in kombu broth and the dish is sprinkled with crispy garlic, shallots and puffed wild rice.
It wasn’t as fluffy and delicious as the king crab rice I ate at Western Lake Chinese restaurant recently, but the rice was cooked perfectly and the egg yolk was a cool addition. Barnholden says he was inspired by a Japanese friend for the cured egg yolk.
Tuna conserva (think confit) with heirloom tomato, anchovy, green beans and soft-boiled egg halves ($14) could be mistaken for salade Nicoise. The tuna was lovely, but the presentation was not. The food was fashionably placed at plate edge but the rest of the plate bore messy swooshes of a green herbal sauce, and it looked like someone’s leftovers.
For dessert, orange almond cake with peaches and buttermilk granita ($9) said goodbye to the last of the season’s peaches. The sweetness was nicely balanced with the tangy granita.
The wine list is short with two reds, two whites, an orange (a non-interventionist white wine really that’s had skin and seeds in bed with it) and a rose.
“Orange wines are how people originally made wines,” says Barnholden.
“We try and go with low intervention wines that are made with integrity and speak of terroir, and not with giant factory wines.”