Today on Food on Fridays I’m going to follow-up a little on yesterday’s comment that there’s a wide variety of food available here in Vancouver.

We’re currently staying just off Denman Street in the West End. I may have mentioned already that when we lived here before there were at least 80 restaurants within an easy walk 5-10 minute of this area. There are now even more, I think.

So the fun has been  both discovering some of our old favorites are still in business 8 years later as well as trying some new ones that are quite good as well.

I’ve already mentioned Guu with Garlic and Legendary Noodle as two of our favorites from before. Today we went back to another favorite for the first time, Simba’s Grill, an African restaurant. Simba is the owner and we thought maybe he would have retired by now. But no, he’s still there, and still in the kitchen. Today was the first time we’d been back on this trip, though, as Simba took a month off for vacation the day after we arrived in town. But we finally go to back and sample the food in a place that used to be one of our favorites:  goat curry with ugali (a pounded flour starchy side-dish), and spinach and lamb cooked in tomato. Still all delicious!  I’d show you photos, but Chris and I were so excited to be back in one of old haunts (Simba even remembered us!), we were pretty hungry when the food came. So, it wasn’t until we were almost done that I realized I’d forgotten to take a photo. Ah well – I’ll try to get a photo or two the next time. And there will be a next time, since we still have a couple more weeks before we leave.

But as I said, part of the fun of the food here is also trying something new.  Earlier in the week we went to lunch at a new-in-the-last-8-years Moroccan restaurant.  We had quite a feast:

1. Chickpea soup:

Chick pea soup at Moroccan Restaurant

2. Ful Medames and Pita Bread

Ful Medames and Pita Bread

3. Lamb Tajine (we’d wanted to try the seafood tajine, but they didn’t have it available the day we were there,  so we ordered this one instead):

Lamb Tajine

Delicious!

In the 5 weeks since we’ve been back in Vancouver on this trip we’ve had the following types of cuisines, some more than once:

• Bulgarian
• Chinese dim sum
• Chinese noodles
• Japanese (multiple times and multiple types)
• African
• Seafood
• Pacific Northwest
• First Nation (Canadian Aboriginal)
• Indonesian*
• Trendy Canadian for lunch*
• Trendy Canadian for brunch
• Funky Vegetarian
• Very Funky Vegetarian*
• Mexican*
• Spanish

(a * indicates that Chris wasn’t there for that meal; I’ve been very lucky and have been taken out to lunch by people who used to work for me – thanks, everyone!)

Anyway, as you can see, in a very short time we’ve been able to eat our way around the world, most of it here in our own neighborhood, too. Fun to have so many options to choose from,  for both eating and deciding what to spotlight in today’s Food on Fridays post.