The Reef Restaurant
The Reef Restaurant (web site, 4172 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada, phone: 604-874-5375) serves Caribbean cuisine, a blend of European, African, and Asian flavors. The decor really adds to the candle-lit atmosphere, complete with a flaming steel drum, a wooden cottage facade with a corrugated tin roof over the kitchen window, and some colorful original paintings (which incidentally are for sale).
Check out their menu, which includes delicious items such as Oistin’s Flying Fish, a “Delicacy of Barbados”, fried in Bajan spices served with tartar sauce ($9, pictured below), as well as the Jamaican Jerk Wild Salmon ($14, also pictured below), which was really flavorful.
Flying Fish - a Caribbean delicacy ($9)
Jamaican Jerk Wild Salmon ($14)
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Did I dine at the same place??? Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect a Caribbean restaurant to have some Caribbean soul. You know slow relaxed friendly service, great food with large servings… well that ain’t the Reef.
Servers were rushed and way too trendy to for Caribbean soul. The food was decent, but portions we embarrassingly small for a Caribbean kitchen. The jerk pork was dry, the curry goat was dry, the rice and peas tasted like it came from a box of minute rice. The pints of beer were served in glasses sub pint size and the pitchers were filled with too much foam and not enough beer. I even ordered a glass of Havana Club reserve neat and let’s just say I inhaled the aroma of the fine rum and the little that was in the glass evaporated into the air.
I wouldn’t go back and would be ashamed to take anyone from any of the islands there.