Aurora Bistro - DOV

Aurora Bistro – DOV
2420 Main Street
Vancouver, BC V5T 3E2

The Main has certainly seen a lot of life pump back into it the past few years. With trendy boutiques and cafes popping up from Broadway all the way up to King Edward, people are realizing that this is the place to be. There are a lot of restaurants too and you can defiantly find some great gems hidden beside some dilapidated looking buildings.

Aurora Bistro has been a Main Street mainstay for a few years now and it’s been getting a lot of notice. Named “Best Regional Restaurant” by Vancouver Magazine last year, Aurora prides itself on using local sources for their foods and being as organic as possible. Owner/Chef Jeff Van Geest has also gotten his fair share of accolades and having gone to VCC and working in the kitchen of Bishop’s, this guy is a Vancouverite through and through.

I’ve been to Aurora a few years ago, probably when it first opened, after a foodie friend of mine made the suggestion. I remembered the small but funky room and the great food I had there. So when I headed there this time around, I was expecting nothing less. Well the room is still small and funky but the food was DEFINATLY not there.

Again, I went for dine out and had been studying the menu posted online religiously. I had already known what I was going to order before I even got there! But when I was presented with the menu, I was surprised to see that a few items had changed. “Well things happened” I thought to myself. So I decided to have the butternut squash soup with pumpkin seeds, the cod with puy lentils and the panna cotta. I heard squash soup has been overdone this dine out season but this was my first time having it and it was defiantly not the type of butternut squash soup I was use to. It lacked flavour and I DID NOT like the pumpkin seeds in the soup. . I kept chewing of them, now knowing if I should spit them out or swallow them whole! The presentation was also very lacking with only the pumpkin seeds strewn on top as garnish. It was very disappointing because butternut squash soup is one of my favourite soups ever.

The second course of the cod with lentils did fair much better. While it wasn’t horrible to say the least, again the flavour was just lacking. It tasted like it could use a dash more salt and herbs on it. The lentils were okay but a bit boring when paired with the cod. I liked how the texture of the cod worked with the texture of the lentils but it was just a bit boring because there was no flavour to either of them.

Finally, it was the panna cotta. I just had panna cotta the night before at Parkside and this panna cotta defiantly did not match up to it. While it was good, the texture was much heavier and you can feel the oil from the dairy in your mouth afterwards.

You can tell it has not been an impressive meal when your dinner companion or you choose NOT to talk about the food at all throughout the entire dinner. Yes, this dinner was suppose to be an opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives outside of the restaurant but the food is suppose to add to the already existing conversation, not make it so that you feel like you should talk about everything else except for the food! I was truly disappointed with this dining experience. Maybe it was because it was a dine out menu. But that doesn’t give the chefs a “get out free card” to cook shitty. Regardless of the occasion or price of food, the product the chefs put out should always be made to the highest quality. It will probably be another few years before I return to Aurora.