Restaurant Review: Mistral

Mistral is a new restaurant on Broadway and Vine, next door to such lauded establishments as Lumiere and Feenies (neither of which I've been to). It's a french restaurant, owned by the same people who once owned L'Emotion in West Vancouver, which was adored by my dad, but was never frequented by moi (I feel like using french words throughout, so I will). Anyhow, since we felt like going out to dinner (ie. giving maman a break from cooking), we decided to go check out Mistral.

With the appetizers, I...was not that impressed. As an appetizer, I had a plate of three different flavours of sauces/spreads. The anchovy-garlic dip was waaay too strong, and not in a good, anchovy-garlic way. It was supremely salty, and instead of having that great anchovy kick, you got a fishy aftertaste. Not pleasant. The cod spread was good on the croutons, but I could only take a very limited quantity of it. Like two bites. The olive tapenade, I'll admit, was awesome. The bro and papa ordered spinach soup to start, which was...really really bland. As the bro (who could only take about a third of the bowl) said, it was as if they'd blanched spinach, and then blended it. No seasoning, nothing. I would have been happier with some spinach sauteed with garlic.

The entrees were loads better. I had honey mussels in a saffrom cury sauce, which were amazing. The one drawback was that the mussels arrived already out of the shell. I personally love taking them out myself, but since I presume that it's meant as a courtesy, I can't really complain. The bro had veal, which also went down well, while my parents both enjoyed their entrees thouroughly (beef stew and...something else, I don't remember).

In the end, an okay dinner. To be fair, this is not an extravagantly priced restaurant (but it's not exactly affordable, either - $18 - $29 entrees), and the service was excellent, and hilarious (ah, les Francais). But if I were to go again, I'd skip the appetizers and go straight to the entrees.