La Brasserie Street
Meal: Brass Sandwich, $7.00 with tax
Fans of La Brasserie’s Davie Street location are familiar with a menu filled with Franco-German comfort foods. I always leave the intimate space of their restaurant yearning to taste more, but unable to squeeze one more bite of their fulfilling portions into my bursting stomach. Seeing their little burgundy food cart on the corner of Granville and Georgia piqued my curiousity—how could they translate the La Brasserie restaurant experience onto a street corner?
The cart is named La Brasserie Street, and offers only one sandwich option plus, as their sign claims, "the best buttertarts in the world." Repeatedly I’ve tried to get my hands on one of their sandwiches, only to find them sold out. Finally this week, fate intervened to give me a tantalizing taste of the elusive Brass Sandwich.
It is certainly not the most attractive of sandwiches. The colour scheme is monotone brown—brown bun, brown onions, brown gravy, brown chicken, and mustard to top. Delving into that first bite, however, removed all doubts and concerns with aesthetics. To summarize it in few words, it’s like a sandwich made from the Sunday dinner leftovers while they’re still fresh from the kitchen. It’s a perfectly proportioned mess of flavours and textures: warm savory gravy, moist and tender beer-brined chicken meat, sweet crispy onions, and a floury buttermilk bun. It’s exciting to see new food options on the streets of Vancouver, and La Brasserie Street is filling in a long neglected niche in the fast lunch food market.
After the pleasant though not entirely unexpected surprise of the Brass Sandwich, I’m tempted to run back there right now to get a taste of their buttertarts.
Would I recommend La Brasserie Street? I’d rather not … it’s my little brown secret.
