This year we decided to visit Joe Fortes during the Dine Out 2010 event.  I settled on this decision after looking through all the menus for some yummy comfort food.  Because Joe Fortes has been a Vancouver staple restaurant for many years, I knew it would be a great dinner.

We arrived at the restaurant for an early dinner.  After walking around downtown for a couple of hours, we were glad to be greeted by the friendly servers.  This place has a super high ceiling and live piano music.  The restaurant wasn’t buzzing when we arrived but started to get busier during our dinner.  The service was friendly and prompt.  Our food arrived soon after we ordered from the Dine Out menu.  It was lightly fast cooking, but I’m sure it’s because the Dine Out menu is set already~

We were given a bread basket to start.  The bread was cold and a bit hard.  Nothing special .  I tried a bit but left a lot of it untouched.

The butter looked super fluffy in its little container, but the taste was bland.

I don’t really expect much from bread baskets though….so I wasn’t too disappointed when I tasted the butter.  There weren’t much buttery taste to it.

For our appetizer, we ordered the Joe’s Raw Plate which has smoked salmon and albacore sashimi.   The smoked salmon was deliciously moist and fresh.  The albacore sashimi was also super soft.  I’ve always loved salmon more so my favourite was the smoked salmon for sure.

The only thing that we didn’t like about this dish was the fact that the sauce was sweet.

The bottom of the dish was covered with broccoli bits(?), onion slices, oyster sauce and oil.  However, the sauce was super sweet and we were not used to this.  Although the dish did help to open our palettes for the rest of the meal.

Our second appetizer is Joe’s Clam Chowder.  We were given a large serving of chowder with a small bag of oyster crackers.
I was very entertained by this little bag of crackers because they were unlike other soup crackers.  I don’t know why they named these oyster crackers because they were just ordinary biscuits to me.  I think it’s probably because of the shape of these things.
In terms of the clam chowder, there was a lot of potatoes in it.  This was not smooth and creamy but rather gritty (from the potato) and full of bacon bites.  This arrived at our table warm and not hot.  The pieces of clam in the chowder were small and there weren’t that many pieces.  But this was good and we liked it more than the raw plate.

Rockia’s entree is the 7 oz sirloin steak and prawns with garlic mashed potatoes, veal jus and a side of corn, dried tomatoes and edamame.  Three pieces of shrimp were also laid on top of the mashed potatoes.

The steak was cooked medium rare.  I really enjoyed this because I love to eat steak!  This was juicy and was marinated in a thick sauce.  The outside had a bit of charcoal burnt layer surrounding it.  The prawns tasted good, but there was nothing special.  It was visually pleasing to add the shrimps to the mashed potatoes though~

I enjoyed the corn with edamame and dried tomoatoes a lot.  Corn can sometiems be soft and mushy on its own.  By adding the edamame, there was more chewiness to this.  I liked the dried tomotoes as well because it added a bit of sweet tomoat flavor to it. This was dish was fairly good (YEH!).

As for my entree, I ordered the fresh shrimp and king crab gomiti with prosciutto, sweet peas and bechamel.  The first thing Rockia said after tasting this dish was that this was something that I usually already make at home.

There was definitely nothing special about this dish.  In addition, I only found 3 square pieces of king crab in this entire pasta dish.  Instead, I was overwhelmed by slices of salty prosciutto ham.  I was a bit disappointed by this dish just because of its taste.  The bechamel sauce was a bit watery…. @@”

As for dessert, we got to try both of their choices: vanilla creme brulee and chocolate lava cake.  I don’t know why I am always attracted to chocolate lava cake.  But Joe Forte’s lava cake tasted very similar to lava cake at Beard Papa.  The chocolate lava cake was served with a dark cheery compote.  I thought this was a bit too sweet, but some people like sweeter chocolate cakes.

As for the vanilla creme brulee, it was bigger than I am used to. The creme was thick and had intense vanilla flavoring.  I didn’t really like this though because the vanilla taste was too strong.

Overall,  our visit to Joe Fortes was good.  We didn’t encounter any surprises throughout the meal.  For $38 per person, I thought it was reasonable because we left the restaurant feeling full.  However, I probably don’t see myself rushing back to try their other menu items.