I originally planned two Dine Outs this year, but I was only able to go to one which was at Pier 73. It is located in the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel. I was trying to stay frugal so I chose the $18 menu at Pier 73 (in Richmond hence easy to go to for me and my parents). Unfortunately, we didn’t have a good dining experience there. 🙁 I think it is kind of sad to do a bad job at Dine Out because the idea is that the restaurant can showcase their dishes and to promote their food, services etc.

The menu for Dine Out, we chose the Salad, Manhattan Style Clam Chowder, Roasted Pork Tenderloin and Grilled Sockeye Salmon.

The salad was probably the best out of all the food I had here, which is sad. It had fresh greens, tomatoes, goat cheese, pecans and canned mandarins tossed in a light dressing.

Honestly, I don’t know why they call it “signature” if they don’t do a good job of it because it was way too salty! It was difficult to taste the other flavours other than the salt. It wasn’t horrible but definitely over-seasoned.

The salmon looked better than it tasted. The risotto was very soggy, didn’t have that al dente texture, it also seemed a bit greasy. It came with some bland blanched veggies and some arugula salad. The salmon was a little over-cooked and didn’t have much of any flavour – I would say it was under-seasoned. I didn’t taste lemon at all even though there was supposed to be lemon butter.

The potatoes were the best of this dish, the other components were not-so-good. I think the biggest problem I had with it was that the tenderloin was over-cooked, so it was not tender at all and was dried out. The red wine sauce and the raisin chutney helped a little but overall it wasn’t great. It also came with some blanched asparagus.

As a person who loves to bake, I think it is not easy to mess up simple desserts like this (maybe not true but that is my opinion). I always think that if a restaurant serves bad desserts, then other dishes can’t be much better. So the desserts weren’t very good. The mousse cake tasted okay, but I couldn’t taste Bailey’s and the stewed cherries kind of tasted like something that came out of a can – I would rather have the cake without it.

The cheesecake was okay, but the cranberry compote was very sour – I personally think it didn’t go well with the acidity of the cream cheese. Nothing special about this, I think a good old New York cheesecake would have been better.

I wasn’t expecting anything over-the-top for a $18 menu, but I think overall the food was prepared poorly. Not that it tasted terrible, I think it could have been much better if the dishes were prepared with more attention. Not to mention that the service was slow that night, it was a busy night, but we waited quite a while for our food.

Con­clu­sion:

Ambi­ence: 3/5 (we sat by the window overseeing the waterfront, but restaurant had poor lighting)
Food: 2/5
Service: 2.5/5 (waited a long time for food)
Value: 2.5/5