Sean Cousins butchers his meat, perfectly fillets his trout and creates a gorgeous venison dish with hat-trick skill
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Former Vancouver Canucks goalie Kirk McLean joins restaurant co-owner and chef Sean Cousins at bar at So.cial at Le Magasin in Gastown
It’s not just the kitchen at So.cial at Le Magasin that’s obsessed with everything local. One of the owners is a local hero.
Kirk McLean is the former goaltender who took the Vancouver Canucks agonizingly close to the Stanley Cup in 1994. Another owner, Bob McCammon, is a former Canucks head coach, which might explain Canucks’ alumni sightings in the restaurant. And that’s just about as far as I can go posing as a hockey know-it-all.
In some parallel universe way, restaurateurs suddenly decided “social” is a cool name. Notice Brown’s Social House on Fourth Avenue. The Habit restaurant owners on Main Street were on the brink of calling their next project social but are back to the drawing board on that.
So.cial (with a gap-tooth period in the middle) is no Shark Club or Malone’s sports bar — far from it, although the downstairs oyster bar has its obligatory TV screens. Co-owner and chef Sean Cousins does have his own kind of hat tricks, concurrently stick-handling fabulous food at Ocean 6 Seventeen, a jewel of a neighbourhood bistro off False Creek, and before that at Raincity Grill and C restaurant.
Before So.cial, the space was heritage tacky under Troll’s and Capri’s. But it wasn’t a Humpty-Dumpty fall that couldn’t be put back together again. The carpet’s been ripped out to expose mosaic tiles, the original tin ceilings are on proud display, and the 1911 building has reclaimed its natural beauty.
In the kitchen, Cousins lets his pampered ingredients do the talking. The menu isn’t written in purple prose; rather, it’s to the point, as in crab — Dungeness crab salad, creme fraiche, cucumber, mint. You see for yourself that he’s conducted the dance of flavours very well.
Part of his 20-hour days are thanks to his DIY take on cooking. He butchers his own meats, and in fact, will open a retail butcher shop across from the restaurant in about a month. “I get to create my own cuts,” he explains. He’s training his sous chefs on the art of charcuterie. I tried his charcuterie plate with a pate, pork rillet and a chicken ballotine. All nice, except I like a country-style coarser pate and his was super fine. He’s also in the process of starting a mini-farmer’s market in the skinny alley off Le Magasin.
His knife skills are evident in the trout dish, perfectly filleted and served with a warm octopus salad and tomato consomme vinaigrette. Cousins is in a surf-‘n-‘turf mood: salmon is served with maple seared pork belly (think bacon) and clam emulsion; pork is stuffed with Dungeness crab and blue cheese and served with apple puree.
The salmon was lovely but my mind rejected pork, crab and blue cheese in one dish. Venison with pureed and pumpkin-seed-and-parsley pesto is a gorgeous dish. A pork and duck confit is formed into a crabcake-like format and served with a stylized mushroom pot pie — delicious.
Overall, his dishes sing with deep and clear notes and you do pay accordingly. Appetizers are $10 to $26; mains are $22 to $29, and you must order side dishes separately. I wasn’t impressed with the Pods, Peas and Fave Beans side dish, which was drenched in butter, but the Kennebec Pomme Frites had me.
The wine list isn’t deep but includes some hard-to-buy B.C. products from Joie and Blue Mountain. A soon-to-be-hired sommelier will be ramping up the cellar. Markups tend to be a little higher than the usual doubling of price. It can all add up to a hefty bill if you’re not careful.
SO.CIAL AT LE MAGASIN
332 Water St., 604-669-4488. (socialatlemagasin.com) Open for lunch and dinner, 7 days a week and brunch on weekends.
Overall: 4
Food: 4
Ambience: 4
Service: 4
Price $$$
Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone. Restaurants are rated out of five stars.
