Cascade Room 2616 Main Street Vancouver

On the Saturday night when we were in Vancouver recently we were looking for somewhere to go for dinner that was no Japanese and was not downtown.  In looking through Urbanspoon we found the Cascade Room on Main Street close to Main and Broadway.

The restaurant screams out hip and urbane, a place for young professionals to hang out and be seen.   These are not qualities that lead me to have faith in the quality of the food, but the reviews on Urbanspoon where good.   Having access to a restaurant review webpage on your smart phone makes going out to dinner so much easier assuming no one is gaming the system.  The Cascade Room has a decent number of positive votes and many good reviews.

A quick digression here.   It is interesting to see how Urbanspoon is not completely the same in each city.   In Victoria it is very hard to find a restaurant with a low percentage of people that like it, but in Vancouver it is normally to see places with more people that dislike it than like.   I would seem that people in Victoria are willing to accept a lower quality of restaurant than people in Vancouver.

The restaurant is loud but not painfully so, you can still hold a conversation.  The decor is nothing fancy but works for the space, to my mind the decor does not live up to the name.   Cascade Room says a 1950s hotel lounge to me, something one might expect to see Don Draper to be having cocktails in.

The menu is decent sized, clearly focuses on local sourced products and is reasonably priced.    The portions are much bigger than I expected and we could not finish what we ordered.   I had the pork loin and ordered a side of the maple glazed beets, I did not need to do so.  The roast potatoes I had with the pork were amazing.   Sheila had the salmon, which she said was cooked to perfection, but was more than she could eat.

The restaurant has a long and detailed cocktail list.   Clearly they are going for a excellence on the drinks side.  You name it, they seem to have it.  They have received some dramatically good reviews.

So good food, decent price, warm ambiance and interesting drinks, it is worth going to and is an experience I can not replicate at home.