HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLFE
Josh Wolfe serves up enthusiasm and great prices to diners in Yaletown
Marc Thuet protégé Josh Wolfe serves up clean flavours at his Yaletown comfort food- oriented eatery.
Good Wolfe Kitchen And Bar
1043 Mainland St. | 604- 428- 1043
Info: Goodwolfe. ca Open: Brunch, Saturday and Sunday; lunch, Wednesday to Friday; dinner, Tuesday to Sunday.
The shaved head and goatee are at odds with the cherubic face and undaunted enthusiasm. Chef and restaurateur Josh Wolfe also has a keen ear, which is why he knows what I look like despite my stealth reviewing.
It happened when I went to grab a lunch at Kaboom Box, the food truck he co- owned at the time. He knew my telephone voice from interviews and when I put my order in, although he was cooking with his back to me, he spun around and said: “Are you Mia Stainsby?”
I’ve been caught out a couple of other times and each time, I’m like a stunned deer in the headlights, and I confess. The truth, that is.
Wolfe is a man of his words, I learn. He’s spotted me twice more at restaurants I’m reviewing and he didn’t ‘ out’ me to the owners he knew. More surprisingly, when I went to review Good Wolfe Kitchen and Bar, his six- monthold Yaletown restaurant, he greeted me with a knowing laugh, stopped at the table, and sent out an extra dessert but didn’t tell staff who I was.
“I made you a promise,” he said when I interviewed him later.
Some may know Wolfe from his food truck, Fresh Local Wild, or from when he was executive chef at Coast and Black + Blue restaurants. Earlier in life, he worked in Toronto under the enormous talent Marc Thuet who, in 2010, was in the Vancouver reality TV show Conviction Kitchen, training excons in the restaurant business.
Considering this is Yaletown, the prices at Good Wolfe are attention grabbing. About half the mains are under $ 20 and the priciest item, steak and potatoes, is $ 24.
The coq au vin, Wolfe says, is an homage to Thuet, “the guy who taught me so much and is like a second dad to me.”
Like Thuet, he separates the chicken from the stew and the dish is light, with textural contrasts, including crispy chicken skin. It’s served with a side of spaetzle and whoa! What deliciousness is that? There appears to be a spaetzle savant in the kitchen. I watched as he whipped the dough off a clipboard into boiling water with a cutter and an exacting flick of the wrist.
“I showed him the traditional way of cutting if off the back of the board like Marc Thuet taught me. He ran with it and the kid I taught does it better than me,” says Wolfe.
Wolfe’s ratatouille lasagna is similarly coddled and babied. The veggies are separately cooked, then stacked and baked and there’s no lasagna noodles at all.
I visited twice and my first visit had me at the appetizers, a lemon pepper chili squid ( fresh, lively, clean flavours) and a steelhead pastrami ( cured, like gravlax, using pastrami spices). There was the coq au vin and a braised beef cheek with risotto that would have earned Thuet’s approval.
Desserts aren’t strong players on the menu. A lemon cake, nicely highlighted with rosemary and lavender, was denser than I’d have liked. Apple crisp was more like a deconstructed apple bread pudding. I think, in this case, the separation is a bad divorce.
A second visit had some rough spots. It started with wonderful little baguettes made in Wolfe’s splurge toy, the $ 25,000 combi- oven. It’s got steam, it’s got convection, it’s great for slow barbecuing ( thus his Bourbon Barbecue offering every Tuesday) and is smarter than most commercial ovens.
Wolfe did a crash course in Texas style barbecue helping out his friend, Adam Perry Lang, who operates Daisy May barbecue in New York, at Barbecoa in London with Jamie Oliver, and at CarneVino, a steak house, with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich). Lang’s barbecue food truck ( and flatbed trailer with barbecue pit) was in a parking lot behind where the Jimmy Kimmel show is taped so they got the Kimmel crowd for lunch.
At Good Wolfe, the Bourbon Barbecue special featured very moist beef slices and a lot of it, unceremoniously plated with cornbread and coleslaw balancing it out.
Surprisingly, what didn’t impress was a salmon dish. It’s surprising considering his tenure as chef at Coast, a high- end seafood restaurant. It was a pink salmon shawarma. It was overdone and rough. It sat on hummus and tomato fattoush and made for a messy dish.
Good Wolfe is open for lunch with a lighter menu of sandwiches, salads, fish and chips and an intriguing dish, seafood chowder poutine.
Wolfe is there daily and meets and greets when he can leave the kitchen, his enthusiasm, an electrical current in the room. It’s an inviting place, staff are friendly and knowledgeable and it’s Wolfe’s mission to have people walk in and deposit problems at the door, along with their umbrellas.
During the duration of Dine Out Vancouver Festival ( Friday to Feb. 2), Wolfe will be running his own threecourse prix fixe menu ($ 28). Being outside the official event allows him to change the menu if he wants, he says.
($: Less than $ 60 for two without wine, tip and tax; $$: $ 60 to $ 120; $$$: more than $ 120) Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Reviews are rated out of five stars.