You’ll be sweet on Honey Salt
Honey Salt hits the spot with elegant country style
It takes a dab of madness to open one restaurant, let alone eight (!), some of them fancy-pants rooms commanding wallet-pinching prices. And that was what Elizabeth Blau and husband Kim Canteenwalla took on as food and beverage operators at the Parq Vancouver comprised of two chic hotels and a casino — Las Vegas in a nutshell.
Las Vegas is where they developed Armor All protection and high roller nerves demanded in audacious ventures. Blau is a Las Vegas consultant who lit fire to the celebrity chef culture (at Bellagio and Wynn hotels) before opening restaurants with Canteenwalla. Now, every notable Vegas hotel requires an astronaut celebrity chef or two or three lending glitter and glam to dining rooms. Canteenwalla oversees the food at all their restaurants, Buddy V’s at the Venetian Hotel (with celeb chef Buddy Valastra as partner), Andiron Steak & Sea, and Honey Salt. And now the power team takes on Vancouver.
I wondered how on earth they’d staff up eight large venues when local restaurateurs are crying the
blues about employee exodus from high-rent Vancouver. Upon opening, some online comments were harsh when it came to service and so given the massive undertaking at Parq, I waited for the dust to settle.
Seven weeks in, I visited Honey Salt, a swishier version of the couple’s Honey Salt in Las Vegas (actually, in Summerlin on the outskirts of Vegas and named after
Howard Hughes’s grandmother). Both take a farm-to-table approach and project a warm and elegant country style personality. The front of house must have been read the riot act and undergone a boot camp; otherwise online comments were just totally off base. We were warmly welcomed (“I like your necklace,” a hostess said) and our server (called Matthew, I believe) was super friendly, knowledgeable and gracious.
Permit me to short circuit and jump way ahead to the sexiest dish on the menu: the Society Cake. I’m not a cake-o-phile at all, especially layered cakes, but this multi-storied highrise of banana cake, chocolate mousse, chocolate cake and chocolate ganache rates an OMG. It’s lusciously delicious but not too sweet. A blast of sweet was in the caramelized banana ice cream. Apparently almost every table orders this and I’d sure order it again. (In fact, I asked for the recipe.)
The cake aligns with the bistro style of food there. Restaurant chef Jason Labahn was plucked from Vegas seven years ago by the Glowbal Restaurant Group to head Black and Blue Steak House. In recent years, he was Browns Restaurant Group’s corporate exec chef.
A few items on the Honey Salt dinner menu are Vegas celebs — the scallops with charred cauliflower, vanilla bean cauliflower purée and truffle sauce ($33) another, ‘My Wife’s Favourite’, a duck confit with pomegranates, mixed greens, pine nuts and orange ($17, and named by Canteenwalla).
To start, I was happy with my burrata and heirloom beet salad ($17) with a honey vinegar dressing, an earthy dish with California burrata. The beets are charcoal roasted in mesquite coal.
The Iberico Pork Secreto ($37) with charred leek, roasted squash, spiced chickpea and smoked egg aioli is local, but only if you’re in Spain. Labahn is so taken with the secreto cut (the loin between the shoulder blades of black-hoofed Iberian pigs which are finished on acorns) that he goes off script and into Spain.
“It’s everything you want in pork — it’s lean, dry, fatty all the way through and there’s all this intense flavour,” he says. I agree. It’s delicious and he’s been nagging local pork suppliers to provide this cut.
But I did find the presentation messy with the veggies suffocating under the generous slices of secreto.
On another occasion, I visited a Parq venue called Mrkt East in a dramatic, spacious setting. The chef, Clement Chan, also runs Torufuku. It’s super casual with offers of familiar pan-Asian foods. The pre-packaged supermarketstyle sushi is a bad intro and didn’t inspire confidence; I found the food uneven — so-so black bean and shrimp and ditto, the mee goreng. However, the Korean barbecue short ribs and Korean japchae noodles were delicious. It’s a good solution to a quick fuel-up before say, a game at Rogers Arena or B.C. Place.