SWEET SPOT
West Hastings establishment Bitter is a beer- lover’s utopia — and the food’s pretty good, too.
Got beer? At Bitter, you might well leave with a foam moustache above your lip line. Bitter is the newest of Sean Heather’s collection of restaurants in Gastown and the Downtown Eastside and this one threatens to grow you a beer gut to go with your moustache.
Bitter specializes in bottled beers ( 60 or so) as well as eight specialty tap beers. What to do to entice beer lovers in a competitive market? For starters, you’ll find Russell Brewing Company’s ice bock on tap.
“It ain’t cheap,” Heather says. It’s $ 7 for a 16- ouncer, the reason being, the beer is frozen and the unfrozen heart of the ice is delicious gold.
“It’s a German- style beer that goes back a hundred years,” says Heather. “An apprentice charged with putting away the barrels from outside, forgot a barrel. It froze and in the heart of it, 20 per cent was very concentrated liquid. They chipped away the ice and saved what was left.”
Also on tap is a milk stout from R& B Brewing.
“They [ once called] it nourishment stout,” Heather says. “It has sugars from milk and some strains of yeast and it gives a milky sweetness. It was issued to soldiers in the First World War.”
He bought a lion’s share of Vancouver Island Brewery’s Hermannator, from Victoria, another ice bock, but this one’s bottled. “It’s heavier, and tastes thicker in the mouth. It’s almost like a beer for people who don’t like beer,” says Heather. And it’s stealthy, with it’s nine- percent alcohol content.
There’s gluten- free beer and for those with sensitivities. With this one, you don’t need to follow with a “yech.”
“They were once not good but now, they’re making top- quality ones,” Heather says.
And did you know Prince Charles ( yes, the royal highness one) makes beer? It’s organic, naturally and you’ll find it here. It’s called Duchy Organic. Ingredients are grown on his farm and it’s produced by his company.
The Brooklyn Black Chocolate stout tastes like dark chocolate and goes great with a flourless chocolate cake or a heavy chocolate dessert, says Heather. There’s a chocolate cream mousse with chocolate ganache and caramelized hazelnuts that would step to that plate.
There’s a nod to wine, cocktails and the hard stuff but really, this place pays homage to beers. Some are in 750 ml bottles for sharing at the table.
Oh yes, the food. At Bitter, beer rules. Food primes you to drink that beer. How can you eat sausages ( quintets on a plate) with mustard, sauerkraut and pickled veggies with anything but beer? It’s a small menu, with cassoulet ( duck, pork belly, Toulouse sausage and beans), chicken and biscuit, the sausages and a vegan dish of roasted cauliflower and kale.
The kitchen is minimal. The food is prepared in one of his other restaurants and pretty much reheated via sous vide or toaster oven. The food is delicious.
For starters or a snack with a beer, there’s sausage rolls, eggs ( devilled, scotch, and pickled), welsh rarebit, pork rilette, a salad, and pretzels.
I wondered about the sous vide. The cassoulet had plenty going for it but it was barely warmed in the water bath. Ditto the chicken, barely warm. Dessert, on that visit, was the correct temperature. It was a lemon sponge with lemon custard.
The temperature improved on a second visit; the vegan dish was hot. The sausages, Heather says, are cooked “the traditional way” in a pot of warm water so the casing doesn’t crack.
I found the pretzels, made inhouse, and served with a nice honey mustard, to be bready and would have liked a little more tooth tug.
Now about that Rodney Graham poster, A Glass of Beer, on the wall of this 103- yearold, as- is Burns Block building. The direct gaze of the guy in the poster was unnerving and I was wondering aloud what it meant ( accusing? questioning? angry?) when my husband said: “Maybe he’s just drunk.” Is that the difference between men and women summed up in a short sentence?