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.

Pier 73 Dine Out 2012 Menu $18/person

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

Baby Spinach Goat Cheese Salad

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.

Pier Sig­na­ture Clam Chowder

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.

Grilled Sock­eye Salmon

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.

Roasted Pork Tenderloin

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.

Mocha Bai­leys Mousse Cake

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.

Spiced Cheese­cake

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