This is an event I was invited to by the restaurant and its promoters. While these are my honest opinions about the food, you should probably know everything was on the house.
So a couple of weeks ago, Popcorn invited me to a menu tasting event at Prestons. I hadn’t been before but I’m always up for discovering new restaurants around town. The place was packed! A lot of usual suspects from the Vancouver food blogging community as well as some old friends I haven’t seen in awhile. No, seriously, there was probably about 100 people in the restaurant and there was enough social media in the room to get the event’s hashtag, #dineprestons, to trend.
Prestons is located in a heart of downtown Vancouver. The restaurant is a dimly lit, lounge-like space with black booths and bright pink accents on the walls. It’s a striking look, very modern and contemporary but I will admit I prefer a little bit more lighting. I’m all for atmosphere but it got to the point where I couldn’t see the menu without the help of the table’s candles.
The menu has a mix of West Coast flavors as well as a number of Asian and Mediterranean influences.
It was a fun event and I had a great time catching up with the familiar faces. The restaurant was a little crowded and moving around was difficult at times but the staff kept up quite well. We also had a heck of a lot of fun taking photo booth pictures with Facebox. These photo booth services have been popping up lately and I think they’re fantastic. They bring back all the fun of those actual photo booths before all those sticker picture machines made them so much sillier.
We started off with drinks including Granville Island lagers. The bar made some interesting cocktails as well but the line was long and fruity drinks aren’t really my bag so I just made repeat trips for beers instead.
This is the Crispy Chicken Karaage, which is fried chunks of garlic sake marinated chicken served with a spicy lime aioli and a miso cabbage slaw. I really prefer my chicken karaage crispier but there’s a lot of flavor in each piece and the slaw and lime freshens everything up.
This was my favorite dish of the night, the Mini Thai Red Curry which contains chicken, eggplant, peppers, red onions and steamed jasmine rice in a spicy coconut curry. The rice and sauce are wonderfully creamy like a risotto. There’s a little bit of a spicy kick but just enough heat to make it interesting. (Thanks to Lesley Chang for hand modeling dishes for me)
These beautiful pieces of pig are Sweet Hoisin and Ginger Glazed Pork Ribs. There’s a distinct, familiar Chinese flavor with the hoisin sauce that penetrates all of these flavorful, tender pork ribs. I could eat a million of these with some rice.
I was slightly disappointed with the Seared Shrimp and Vegetable Dumplings with Miso Vinaigrette. It’s not because they aren’t good but I’ve just had better. The ingredients might be fancier but I’ll take the potstickers at Hon’s. It might just be the texture as I think these things need to have a nice crunch in that wrapper, which I find you only get by broiling or roasting rather than pan searing.
I’ll tell you what did have a nice crunch – the fries in the Mini Poutine with Pulled Pork, Quebec cheese curds and Rickard’s Red Gravy. The fries are wonderfully crispy and the gravy mixed with the pulled pork is actually lighter than you would expect. Poutine is usually a mush messy but the crispy fries separate this from your usual mall food court fare.
This is a Tomato and Bocconcini Crostini. I can’t really remember much about it and I only had one so I can’t give much feedback.
The Dungeness Crab Cakes had big, meaty chunks of crab in them with a light, crispy coating. They were nice and moist on the inside but could use a little more seasoning.
If I’m honest, I was already rather full by the time I got to the Braised BBQ Pork Sliders with homemade BBQ sauce and gorgonzola coleslaw so that might have something to do with why I didn’t really enjoy them. The flavors didn’t really work together for me.
For dessert, we had these mini Matcha Creme Brulee. The combination of green tea in the custard isn’t something I would order myself but maybe just because I’m not big on desserts. Everyone else seemed to like them, though. I’m pretty sure Lesley had two.
The menu at Prestons is actually quite reasonably priced, comparable to the chain casual dining restaurants in town like Cactus Club and Earl’s. While not everything was a hit, nothing needed more than a little tweak in the right direction. The lunch menu in particular looked like a great value with lots of options in the roughly $15 range. I’ll definitely be back sometime to give Prestons a proper look on a regular day.
