Burdock & Co (Vancouver)

Tasting menus are often our favorite way to explore new restaurants - they tend to be great ways to be creative for chefs without any limitations and give you the opportunity to truly explore their thoughts on any cuisine.

Andrea Carlson opened Burdock & Co in 2013 in Vancouver and uses the place to showcase her approach to cook with local ingredients covering many regional farms. Throughout the night we really enjoyed her well executed and thoughtful dishes which often had some interesting flavor additions, e.g. preserved scallops. At the same,
time, we normally don’t understand people who often complain about tasting menus as too little food for too much money. Unfortunately at Burdock & Co we felt for a very long time that price and amount of food didn’t really match. It might be the first time that we finished a tasting menu and left quite hungry. Overall, we definitely would recommend Burdock & Co for the creative dishes and cooking style but are not sure about the overall value.

  1. Course - Burdock Breads with aged sake kasu butter - three different house-made breads with one sourdough type (named arctic bread as the mother was started on an arctic tour), soda bread and a milk bread. All of them very good but the highlight was the aged sake kasu butter which added fantastic salt, umami and funk


2. Course - Radish - shio koji roasted, kombu, preserved scallop - slightly warm radishes with again nice umami nuances but also some saltiness and faint “sea” flavors


3. Course - Gnocchi - halibut stuffed morels, asparagus, green garlic cream - the very light gnocchis with the fiddleheads and the aromatic green garlic cream were already great but the morels really put it to another level as they were stuffed with a flavorful halibut farce


4. Course - Dry Aged Beef Striploin - charcoal grilled, endive, spring herb chimichurri, jus - The 30 day aged striploin was very tender and had a nice, beefy flavors but the jus was outstanding especially eaten together with the meat


5. Course - Chocolate Soufflé Cake- Miso caramel, smoked marscapone - Good balance of chocolate, some smokiness from the mascarpone and umami (common theme throughout the dinner)


Mignardise - macaron - They were OK but tasted a bit as they weren’t fresh

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