Hunnybee’s atmosphere is always sunny side up
To the Winnie The Pooh impersonator who crept into a Strathcona yard, purloining honey and destroying the hive in the process: shame! The hive was tended by Matthew Senecal and Sean Cunningham, owners of recently opened Hunnybee Bruncheonette and the longer-running restaurant The Birds and The Beets.
Now, they don’t use homegrown honey for dishes like the honey yogurt they serve with their house-made granola.
“The colonies were three years old,” says Senecal. “For the first two years, it’s a modest yield, but this year we expected a more decent yield. It’s totally mind-boggling that it happened.”
So instead, they use honey from local producer, Hives for Humanity, with hives in different Vancouver locations.
“Depending on where it’s from, they taste dramatically different,” says Senecal. The Commercial Drive neighbourhood is plummy and Strathcona is floral, he says.
Hunnybee Bruncheonette, as you’d expect, is a breakfast and lunch restaurant with a sunny, welcoming disposition. It has a simple and healthy menu with about a dozen items including breakfast sandwiches, rose and coconut muesli, poached egg and avocado toast, ricotta pancake, labneh and lemon curd on sourdough. Breads (sourdough, focaccia and milk buns) are made at The Birds and The Beets kitchen. Specials are often toast with toppings like house-cured salmon and capers.
When I stopped by for lunch, I loved the shakshuka ($12, two perfectly poached eggs over tomato stew with lentils and housemade labneh) with focaccia.
The stew was lively with herbs and spices.
The Big Green Salad ($11) was indeed big and packed with nutrition. Roasted squash, beetroot and potatoes joined with tomatoes, grain and pickled zucchini, lightly dressed with a herb dressing. These healthy options were licence to have dessert. There’s a small selection of
baked goods, including cookies, muffins, sourdough cinnamon buns and, sometimes, bread pudding.
My husband’s lamb sandwich ($12, dukkah marinated lamb, harissa yogurt, marinated zucchini, roasted red peppers and greens) was bright and flavourful between fresh focaccia. The cortado was very good, too. (Spain’s less foamy cappuccino.)
“The emphasis is on simple things we make ourselves. We don’t make a big deal of it being local or sustainable. We don’t have gimmicks, the food’s not showy,” says Senecal. But there are some nice pirouettes like the whipped egg whites in the ricotta pancakes for an airy liftoff and the house-made ingredients.
It might not be front and centre, especially on weekdays, but there’s booze in the form of cocktails and spritzes.
If you’re wondering about the balled-up letters on the wall, they spell Soap and that’s another business. At night. That’s when it morphs into a cocktail-focused restaurant from Wednesday to Saturday. It’s operated by Tyson Davies, who formerly ran the bar at Bao Bei. The night-shift operation parallels what happens at The Birds and The Beets where every evening The Juice Bar pop-up invents itself regularly, with guest chefs like David Gunawan, Ernesto Gomez and others expressing themselves with snack foods, often very different food from what they do in their restaurants. Melanie Witt, of Savio Volpe, for instance, took a break from Italian and cooked Indonesian one night.
At Soap, however, the food program is much more focused, usually with Asian dumplings by Shelome Bouvette of Chicha Peruvian restaurant.
Hunnybee and Soap add to the colourful food happenings in the Chinatown/Strathcona neighbourhood where Senecal and Cunningham have resided for nine years.
“For better or worse, we’ve seen the change from when fellow cooks and young artists lived in cheaper apartments,” says Senecal.
Yes, in that time, the old Chinatown has slowly eroded but interesting independent restaurants have gone in and I’ve written about Bao Bei, Harvest House, Juke, Sai Woo, Virtuous Pie, Ramen Butcher, The Union, Juniper, Fat Mao, Rhinofish Noodle Bar, Dalina, Kokomo Cafe, Kissa Tanto, and visited The Keefer Bar and The Pie Shoppe.
And I lauded one for reinforcing old-timey Chinatown: that’s Chinatown BBQ, a wonderful recreation and homage to the old Chinese restaurants with staff from a late, beloved barbecue house operating the kitchen.