Boneta

Boneta
1 Cordova Street West

The tagline here is “Boneta Loves You. Xoxoxo” Well I certainly felt the love when I went there this past Friday with one of my girlfriends. This place is really just a gem in the Vancouver restaurant scene! With some much heart and soul that went into opening this place up, it’s hard not to love everything about Boneta.

If you don’t already know the back story, Boneta was opened by Mark Brand (former Vancouver Magazine’s Bartender of the Year, ex. Chambar), Andre McGillivray (ex. Chambar, Lumiere, Le Crocodille, Chill Winston) and Neil Ingram (ex. Lumiere, La Buca). Named after Mark Brand’s mother, Boneta was opened with a budget of $89,000, which in the restaurant industry, is peanuts…or less than peanuts – won’t even get you the pack of nuts on an airplane. But with a lot of help from friend in and out of the industry, and plenty of love, heart and soul, this amazing room opened and it’s been non-stop ever since.

The room itself is really nice. After stripping away all the old crap, the guys uncovered some great hardwood flooring and gorgeous brick walls. Add to that a large array or mirrors from the ceiling, some contemporary art pieces and a menu that is directly projected onto the wall above the kitchen, Boneta is defiantly a funky place that makes you just want to sit and stare for awhile.

The menu at Beneta is constantly changing. They often tweak their food during the week and a new menu is brought out every week to keep things fresh and as far from boring as possible. Here’s the good news of the night-the flavours were awesome! Everything just came together perfectly and presentation was great. The bad news of the night-I had ordered duck breast and apparently, they like to cook their duck to medium rare. Now I don’t know about you but when it comes to birds, I liked mine cooked…well. I guess duck is much safer than chicken but still. I just couldn’t finish the center part of the meat. I mean everything else was great and I polished off my plate but the duck was too rare for me. As for my dinner companion who had ordered fish, her fish was a bit overcooked while the bed of beans it was resting on was undercooked. Again, the flavours were great but the temperatures of both our proteins were just not to our liking.

We both really did enjoy our meal and didn’t want to cause trouble but when Mark came to clear our dishes, we both shyly mentioned the problem. Now here is what makes Boneta so great. Mark was super accommodating and asked if we wanted the kitchen to cook us something else. Seeing that we both had nearly finished our plates, we were not looking for a free ride here and so we declined. We felt bad enough telling him but we figured a new restaurant would welcome that kinda input, you know, to learn from it. We told him how much we enjoyed the meal regardless of the misgivings and we just wanted to let the kitchen know. Afterwards, our waitress came up and told us Mark insisted on giving us free dessert. We didn’t even want dessert and was actually going to Salt for some after dinner drinks. However, we stayed for dessert and in the end, ordered one of Mark’s awesome cocktails. Now this is the guy who won the Bartender of the Year award and it certainly showed in his creations. Both our cocktails were just sensational and really original (well at least in my opinion.) So even tho we had some trouble with our food, we ended up staying and spent more than what we were planning on spending.

Boneta is a really great place and I totally plan on coming back. The people are really what makes this place special and I hope they do spectacularly and that they get to open up a few more joints like this! Like they say: Boneta Loves You…xoxoxo

ps. check out this video of a profile on the guys and the restaurant...seriously funny! How can you not love these guys after this???

http://www.cbc.ca/livingvancouver/?page=segment&sid=5913