Martincath...some advice?

[ErLee]

Hi martincath!

 

i tried to direct message but it won’t let me....sometime last year you kindly gave me some good advice about Vancouver in June. Because of that, we booked the YWCA for our 2 night precruise stay.  That’s the start of our two week 25th anniversary trip to Alaska. While in Vancouver, I hope we can enjoy some good wine and a great dinner - maybe seafood - to start our trip off well. The money we’re saving by staying at the Y can be spent enjoying Vancouver!

 

I know restaurant recommendations can change over time, so now that we’re 50 days from our trip, what are your best recommendations? We’ll be there for one dinner, as well as two breakfasts and one or two lunches.

 

Also, is there a good wine store near the Y to get some bottles to carry onboard?  Do you know how Canadian prices on wine compare to US?

 

If the weather is good we plan to rent some bikes and ride around Stanley Park. We hope to go to Granville Island as well, and I’m working on our other top priorities for what I’m sure won’t be enough time to do your lovely city justice. We have all day on Tuesday and half a day on Wednesday until we decide to board the ship. I’m more interested in using that time in Vancouver than lining up for early boarding!  It’s is so hard to figure out what to do to hit the highlights in a short amount of time! 

 

Any advice appreciated, you are such a wealth of information and so generous with your time to answer all our questions. I’ve been wanting to visit Vancouver for a long time and specifically picked my Alaska itinerary to accommodate that on the front end before we get too tired! City visits at the end of a trip are never as fun.

 

Thank you in advance for your help!

 

 

[ErLee]

One more question - my thought was to explore on our own, but do you think booking one of the many tours of Vancouver is a better option?  Will we find it hard to navigate on our own in a city we’ve never been to and end up not seeing as much?

[Heidi13]

Although the software has PM capability, CC have disabled the feature.

[martincath]

Sorry for the delay - traveling and didn't notice your post until getting back home. BTW, while I'm very flattered you're specifically asking me there are other locals around who can certainly give you info on all of the above (and for many of your questions, past visitors are also a useful resource) and not directing it at a specific individual will likely mean you get a broader range of responses, plus of course your 'target' person's reply. I'm guessing that Heidi would have actually answered some of your points if you hadn't aimed it at me, but is giving me 'first dibs' on replying for example 😉

 

In not-quite-the-same-order of your questions:

1) Food

I'm still recommending Coquille first to anyone who asks for a Seafood dinner, unless I *know* that you want to burn some serious cash! In the $50-100pp range I still think they are the best option in the city - I've yet to have a duff dish, the menu staples have remained consistent in size and quality, seasonal dishes vary frequently so there's always something new to try, and prices have not skyrocketed since they opened. Happy Hour remains a superb value in an already great value resto - so even if you want to book a table, if you can handle dining on the earlier side book it for any time after 5pm when dinner starts but show up earlier for a seat at the bar, a cocktail, and a few HH nibbles then move to your table (some HH options are unique to that menu, so if you want them you have to arrive early enough and sit at the bar).

 

For breakfast, again my consistent recommendation remains Medina - since the day they opened they've had the best breakfast in the city. A few other 'real' waffle places have opened (yeast-risen, and even other 'caramelized sugar coated' Liege style ones) but as well as those waffles and the beautiful sauces to accompany them there is a wealth of other more substantial brekky dishes. The 'Middle Eastern' twist on many of the recipes might make them sound a bit odd, but again I've yet to try anything that wasn't delicious. Since you have 2 brekkies to manage, some other top-notch places to try include Wildebeest and Catch 122 (the latter has been well-known for good brekkies for several years, but somehow Wildebeest remains under the radar - so if there is a big queue at Catch 122 just walk the ten steps or so to Wildebeest...) Catch overhauled their menu from top to bottom twice in the last ~3 years, so I've only actually tried a couple of dishes on the most recent iteration - but the standard remains high.

 

Breakfast or Lunch you could do a lot worse than be on Granville Island and hit up Edible Canada. One caveat - chef just changed and he's overhauling the menu, so while it sounds like it will remain 'spiritually' the same just with even more focus on seafood and plant proteins there's always a bit of a learning curve. A couple of months from now it should be firing on all cylinders - the rest of the kitchen remain the same and the prior chef had them all working very smoothly, so I'm planning to pop in soon myself (frankly I want to get in before cruise season picks up, as GI becomes intolerably busy with all you cruisers thronging the place during the day!!! 😉) If there's any ghastly drop in quality, I'll come back and warn you - but right now in terms of their Brunch menu it looks like adding a few new dishes (including some with fried duck eggs) rather than getting rid of the classics (the breakfast poutine has always been seriously good).

 

Another handful of 'unique to Vancouver' suggestions - JapaDog makes for a great quick lunch or snack and there are many little carts/food trucks/even a sitdown resto. It's quirky, and you won't really find it anywhere else (I tend to always go back to the Kurobota Pork Terimayo dog). We have a ton of food trucks, and a wide range of types - figuring out which are open and where they are is best done with the Streetfood App. Izakayas are a category of resto that we have a ton of but almost nowhere else outside Japan has (a sort of English Pub meets Spanish Tapas bar but with Japanese foods) - local chains Guu and Hapa are very popular, Kingyo is probably the most popular indy. Unfortunately we're back down to just one sitdown Native resto again (a Bannock truck appears occasionally), but the good news is Salmon & Bannock aren't going anywhere in the near future. It's a little out of the way for the Y, other side of False Creek, but if you want to try a truly Canadian menu it's worth the bus or cab ride. Lots of salmon dishes obviously, and bannocks also feature heavily, but for me it's the more obscure fish and the game meats (best pricing on these in the city) that entice. They might reopen for lunch by the time you arrive, but it's been dinner service only over the winter season.

 

2) Booze

All types of booze is expensive compared to just about anywhere in the US, except maybe Alaska, as we have some hefty Sin Taxes (and whatever you see on the shelf, there's a 15% Sales Tax plus a bottle deposit of 10cents for regular size bottles). Even with our weaker dollar you can expect to pay a premium - depending what your state levies in Duties/Tax you may be slightly shocked or not (e.g. compared to WA/OR where we buy most of our liquor and a fair bit of wine, the same bottle in Vancouver is around 2 to 2.5x the price in CAD for pretty mainstream US-made products - French and other European wine is less marked up in comparison, and the odd niche fortified product can actually be the same price or even a hair cheaper up here, e.g. Port or Campari).

 

There's a BC Liquor Store very convenient for the ship - opposite Waterfront Station, on the lower level of the Harbour Centre - so if it's just a couple of bottles each to take onboard you could pick them up there. From the Y, closest liquor stores are private (more expensive - they still have to buy through the BC Liquor distribution network, so that means prices tend to be anything from 10-50% higher for the same stuff). Nearest local BC wine shop is Swirl in Yaletown - if you want to try BC made wines it's a great place, with frequent tastings, and prices are the same as BC Liquor. If you want familiar product from US/Oz/Chile etc. the BC Liquor on Pacific is closest - 10mins walk straight down Beatty, which ends at Pacific so just look slightly to your right at the opposite side of the street and you'll see it. It's a small store, but carries a decent range of mainstream booze.

 

3) Touring vs Indy sightseeing

New city, unfamiliar, I do find that there's a lot of value in a tour. Finding out a bit of history, seeing key landmarks, and just getting an idea where things are in relation to each other can make the rest of your touring just that little bit smoother - but these days with Google Streetview you can virtually walk around before you even leave home, so a Transit DayPass (~$10pp) and a good guidebook (say $30 for a rack-rate Rough Guide) are even better value than they used to be. Which is best for you, depends on what kind of traveler you are!

 

Personally I feel if you're going to take a tour, take a HOHO due to the flexibility - and if you agree that would have made life really easy for you as there was just one company running them locally (WestCoast) due to the amalgamation of the last two, but it turns out that the other big player in local coach tours, LandSea, are launching their own HOHO on May 1st this year! That hopefully means some discounts - WestCoast have been, bluntly, total a**holes since the merger with the Trolley (they jacked up pricing 20% from day one, abandoned any significant discounts, and cut back on the total number of vehicles running). I'm guessing that this last point is the one that has hurt them - because it's meant that a bunch of experienced drivers have become unemployed and now LandSea will be able to launch with a much more experienced fleet than if they were starting totally from scratch! They won't have to poach their own drivers away from their other coach tours for the HOHO/hire total newbies. But of course, the quality of their product is currently unknown... so I'd pay attention to reviews on TripAdvisor for both WestCoast and LandSea and see if there's any consensus that one seems better than the other, and if it seems like a wash look for deals and buy the cheapest!

 

Getting around independently is easily done on foot in the downtown core; with bike rentals (JV on Expo is closest to the Y, and also en route to the Seawall so you can get to separated bike lanes, no cars, and nice views ASAP!) if you want to completely avoid traffic you may have to stick to the outskirts of the peninsula but that means Seawall riding all the time (nice!) and still much faster than walking. AquaBus has dedicated RORO ferries - they call them 'Cyqabus' models - which mean you can ride to Granville Island without having to go the long way around the end of False Creek. That would make it easier to e.g. cycle up to the park first thing, ride around it, head back into town and hop over to GI for lunch and browsing the stores, then burn off your lunch calories by cycling around the end of False Creek on the way back to the Y (aim for the big glass ball like a mini-EPCOT).

 

The HOHO takes in most of the downtown core popular sites - as do all of the 'precruise' type city tours, just with the latter you get way fewer stops and once it's over it's over (whereas HOHO can be used for 24hours, so potentially can be useful going out again for dinner etc. - but NB: that the HOHOs only go in one direction, so it can also be quicker to walk between stops than go the long way around, and stop running pretty early - I doubt the new LandSea will go any later than the ~6pm that WestCoast run to).

 

I did take a HOHO here back in the day when my parents first came to visit and I'd only been living here a few months - but other than that I've only ever done walking tours, mostly rather niche ones like with the local Architectural Institute. The TourGuys free walking tours are pretty hard to beat in value - you tip what you feel the tour was worth at the end, and they cover pretty broad info and popular areas so work better for first-timers than locals (IIRC they do Downtown and Chinatown on alternate days in summer, and have Granville Island tours at least a couple of times a week - check schedule against your dates).

 

As to where to go - a short visit like yours I'm always loathe to recommend anything specific as tastes vary so much, when you have to really focus tightly down onto a handful of options I'm confident I could suggest solid, popular-with-most-folks options but whether they'd be the BEST sites for you is just too subjective. TripAdvisor is definitely your friend - all the big sites have so many hundreds & thousands of reviews that their relative ranking is very reliable. All you have to do is know what kind of stuff you enjoy more or less than Joe Q Public does - starting with the top ten or so, reading up on the spiel, seeing if it sounds like the kind of place you would spend a lot of time carefully reading all the little plaques on trees/under paintings or just grab a quick pic and hustle on to the next room/path will help you decide which sites should bump up in the rankings or down for YOU.

 

If you've got questions about your curated list of possible sites, like how best to get between them/which order to do them in and other logistical info, that's where us local types can add some value again so come on back to ask that sort of stuff.

[ErLee]

Thank you once again for your detailed recommendations!  I see what you mean that I may have limited my potential responses, I didn’t think of it that way because I was originally trying to PM you so I had that in my mind!

 

I’ve made a list of your restaurant recs in my phone - Coquille looks perfect for HH and dinner - and am following your other suggestions about working out what we have time for while we’re there.  I didn’t know there was a ferry we could take the bikes on, that’s a great tip!  

 

Trip Advisor has so much on it that I find it to be a kind of info overload, but I’m going to soldier on and try to glean some good ideas!  I’m sure I’ll have some more questions after I do that.....