AnnaLena
Kitsilano
AnnaLena makes a serious case for not taking the room too seriously. Michael Robbins and Jeff Parr run a Kitsilano restaurant where Lego sculptures and nostalgic bric-a-brac pop against moody navy walls, and the mischief carries onto the plate — a multi-course tasting that repackages familiar flavours in unfamiliar ways, like an elk-tartare riff on a cheeseburger. Since 2020 Robbins has committed fully to the tasting format, all of it grounded in seasonal British Columbia ingredients and a refined technique the playfulness can disguise. It is fine dining without the starch: warm, inventive, and confident enough to be funny, which is far harder to pull off than solemnity.
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Kissa Tanto
Chinatown
Kissa Tanto sits up a flight of stairs in Chinatown, in a room modelled on the jazz cafés of 1960s Tokyo — moody, dim, hung with antique panels and old photographs. The conceit could be a gimmick; instead it frames one of the city's most distinctive kitchens. Joël Watanabe and Tannis Ling built the place around the unlikely marriage of Japanese and Italian cooking, and it works: hand-cut tajarin dressed with miso-cured egg yolk, crudo alongside pasta, a tiramisu that turns eastward. Nearly a decade on, the food still surprises without straining for it. It is a restaurant to linger in, which is precisely what the setting was designed to make you do.
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Sumibiyaki Arashi
Mount Pleasant
Sumibiyaki Arashi raised the bar for yakitori in Vancouver, and did it from a fourteen-seat counter in Mount Pleasant. Pete Ho grills over binchotan charcoal, drawing clean, deep flavour from heritage-breed chicken through careful butchery, a tare maintained over decades, and a feel for exactly when each skewer is done. The omakase is anchored in those skewers but moves beyond them — a yuzu-scented crab chawanmushi, delicately fried tofu, seasonal fish threaded through the progression. Blending Ho's Taiwanese background with Japanese technique, it treats a humble form with the seriousness usually reserved for sushi. The result is uncomplicated on the surface and quietly profound underneath, which is the whole art of it.
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