Location: 562 Beatty Street, Vancouver BC (604 879 7119)   
Chambar Belgian Restaurant

Author: My Husband

It was one of those blissful weekends of meeting up with friends, hanging out, and eating some really great food. No chores to do, no work to catch up on, no bank/doctor/dentist/[insert boring task] appointments to keep – like I said, blissful… Saturday morning, Christina and I went to Spa Utopia with her friend L and we all got all de-stressed and ‘relaxed up’ for the weekend ahead. That was followed up by H’s BBQ Saturday evening, dim sum with the parents Sunday morning, and dinner with a long-lost friend on Sunday evening.

Save for a chance encounter in Singapore in 2003, I haven’t seen VC in over 10 years. We were pals at University, but he returned to HK after completing his studies and we gradually lost contact over the years. But friendship never really ends does it? It might take a breather and be placed on hold, but it’s always there, waiting for the right trigger to come along and jumpstart it. For VC and I, that trigger was Facebook. Say what you might about Facebook, but it really is a fantastic tool for getting back in touch with long-lost friends. And when we found out through Facebook that VC was going to be in town for a visit, we rustled up some of the old gang from school and agreed to meet up at Chambar to reminisce about days gone by…

I haven’t been to Chambar in over a year, so I was quite curious to see if the room had changed. Impressions upon walking into the restaurant were good. The same airy, but atmospheric space, greeted us. The exposed beams, the naked brick walls, the lighting design, and the height of the ceiling made the room both spacious and cozy at the same time; it felt like the right kind of place for a group of old friends to share an evening.

Christina started with “La Tapas de Poule” – a baby octopus salad. The octopus meat was tender, with just enough firmness to give it a satisfying chew, but not chewy enough to make the process tedious. The salsa and lime juice provided the acidity that was needed in a dish like this, and some slivers of romaine gave it a nice textural contrast. Taste wise, it was one of those “good, not great” dishes.

I had the bison carpaccio. Dressed in olive oil and accompanied with some sweet beets, it was very tasty. I am growing to like bison more and more. For all its “exotic” qualities, I find it to be as tender and as flavourful as regular beef, and it has more of the good stuff (omega-3 fatty acids, iron, antioxidents) and less of the bad (saturated fats). Sounds like a winner to me. The potato chips that accompany the bison make the dish quite novel; that said, the chips were quite effective in delivering the salt and texture contrast for the meat.

Christina then followed up with the Beef Bourguignon – a nicely cooked slab of ribeye in a red wine sauce. Regular readers will know that Christina likes her steak, so it was no surprise that she thoroughly enjoyed this. I thought it was very well prepared, but I didn’t find it any better or worse than steak in establishments of a similar calibre.

I chose the lamb tajine for my main. I don’t see the connection between tajine and Belgian cusine, but I will say that the chefs at Chambar cook a really mean tajine. They weren’t shy about being generous as well – there was a lot of meat on the lamb shank. The cinnamon came through clearly, and the sweetness of the sauce, as well as the figs, gave the dish a distinctly middle eastern taste profile. I think it is a very successful dish. The tajine came with a bowl of cous cous that looked very pretty, but tasted quite bland. However, I tasted the cous cous as an afterthought, and I suspect that the explosion of flavours that was the tajine probably masked the seasoning of the cous cous.

And of course, at a Belgian restaurant, how could we not order the frites? They were every bit as good as they look.

By the time we finished our mains and the fries, Christina and I were quite full. However, there was an item on the dessert menu that intrigued us. Not quite a cheese course, but not quite a dessert either – it was a “Brie chaud aux fraises” or a warm brie with strawberries. We ordered it to share and we both ended up liking it. The soft, almost runny, brie complemented the sweet/tart strawberries very well, with the short crust providing a nice interplay of textures.

Even though it was a Sunday, the restaurant was hopping. There was a fair amount of high-spirited buzz and chatter in the room, and that was very much aligned with the mood at our table: old friends catching up, new friendships starting, food and drinks being enjoyed, and much laughter punctuating the conversation. The food was great, the atmosphere couldn’t be better, but a bunch of friends getting together and shooting the breeze – that’s what made the evening.

So to my old friend VC, and my new friend MM, let’s not wait another 5 years to catch up again… Let’s hook up in HK next year?