PRESS RELEASE | Mon Amour & Valentine's Menu at TWG Tea / January 27, 2018 by Jenn Chan

This Valentine’s Day, TWG Tea invites you to embrace the season of flowers and romance with TWG Tea’s collection inspired by the blush hues of the delicate rose. Capturing the essence of love in a sensual Darjeeling tea blended with delicate rose blossoms, Amour de Thé is an enchanting potion elegantly packaged in blush pink and gold caviar tin tea and gift box, making it the ideal gift to dazzle the hearts.

On February 14th, beckon your beloved with a cup of Mon Amour Tea, a magical potion composed of a rich black and sweet notes of quince, the sacred fruit of the Goddess of Love.
Perfuming the air with rare and precious essences, the Bain de Roses Tea Scented Candle perfectly accompanies evenings of sweet romance. The dusky Grasse roses of envelop you in an intoxicating perfume combined with a secret bouquet of black tea, heady notes of white sandalwood, warm vanilla and fresh grapefruit.

The Valentine's Day Menu will be available on the following dates & times:

February 1-13:

Monday to Friday, 10am-7pm
Saturday & Sunday, 10am-8pm

February 14:

10am-9pm

Reservations may be booked by phone at (604) 692-0071 or by email at TWGCanada@VanSingDG.com.

Valentine's Day Menu: Notch8 at Fairmont Hotel Vancouver / February 13, 2017 by Jenn Chan

Our server Kristina was a gem! Colloquial, but with a sophisticated edge and endless kindness. She suggested a couple of cocktails for us. JC had the Bubbles and Berries: Finlandia Vodka, fresh raspberries, fresh lemon, Sumac Ridge Sparkling White Wine. Champagne based cocktails are a crap shoot. Generally they'll mask the offensiveness of the $5 bottle of champagne with fruits and syrups and what-have-you, but Notch8 does things right and the result was a delicious, well balanced concoction. I had the Lilloet Daisy Zubrówka: fresh lemon, blueberry syrup and elderflower liqueur served in a tiki mug. It was sweet and absolutely delicious, elderflower is my bae!

The long weekend is owing to BC's newest statutory holiday, Family Day which, to my mind, will be Premier Christy Clark's only positive legacy. You'd be hard pressed to find anything else nice to say about her tenure. From being the only BC Premier to lose her own riding to her trying to sell the rights to mine our natural gas resources to foreign interests... you get the idea, I'm not a fan, but for letting us turn up on a Sunday we salute you. I guess.

The first course was called Roses by the Sea and for good reason. Rose poached shellfish, caviar, rose petal creme fraîche, green apples, rosewater mist. I had to stop Jenn a few times to alert her to the deliciousness of the bite I'd just had. Crab meat with caviar, shrimp with green apple or scallop with rose petal crème fraîche... that wasn't even all the incredible combinations in this one dish!? Amuse bouche... This was only the amuse bouche!? Right then I knew we were in for a good night! It was paired, quite elegantly, with a Kanazawa Sakura rosé. Strawberry notes dominate, but in a good way, not in a 14 year-old's first $5 strawberry wine kind of way.

Roses by the Sea - rosé poached shellfish, caviar, rose petal crème fraîche, green apples, rosewater mist

Stop it Chef Will! Just stop. We came to Notch8 a few weeks ago to highlight their Dine Out Vancouver 2017 menu and Chef Will wowed us with his presentation; a frozen pond inspired oyster dish. Today he came out again, thanked us profusely for our previous post, and presented us with a 62 degree egg, beef tartare, uni and sea buck thorn gelee all served in a glass, smoked-filled globe. Stop it Will! It came with nori chips, they themselves would have been absolutely incredible in their own, and the tartare was hands down, no question, the best I've ever had! The egg, once pierced, oozed into the raw beef and formed a cacophony of savoury flavours. I mouthgasmed.

Reeling from first two dishes Chef Will brought out Notch's Savory Tart: foie gras, duck confit, sous vide quail egg, candied hazelnut and brandy apricot compote. This is not the slimy, bitter liver I was forced to sit at the table, as a young boy, until I ate it all. This is foie gras, fat liver. I know that translation isn't going to inspire a ton of food lust, but paired with a Meyer Family Pinot the two combined perfectly not unlike the Sedin twins or peanut butter and jelly or oxygen and human life. I would gladly choose to eat nothing else for the rest of my life regardless of the nutritional value. That's all I have to say, go get some!

Savoury Tart - foie gras, duck confit, sous vide quail egg, candied hazelnut, brandy apricot compote

To Share and to Savor: dry aged beef strip loin, cognac jus, black truffle, gold leaf butter and marrow roasted potatoes. Jenn called it the "best steak I've ever had". An inch thick, aged striploin bloody as can be and as delicious as any striploin I've ever had! I'll acquiesce to the fact that the mashed potatoes were definitely top five of my life. Bone marrow anything is delicious and this was the first time that flavour had been infused into mashed potatoes and it was triumphant!! This platter itself would have been enough for 3-4 people. The fact that it's just one of many dishes on this Valentine's Day menu at Notch8 shows the caliber of cuisine they're determined to push out. As previously mentioned we attended Notch for Dine Out. Unequivocally it was our favourite of the Dine Out festival and it will be a go-to for the rest of our lives. It's simply that good!

To Share and to Savour - dry aged beef striploin, cognac jus, black truffle, gold leaf, butter, marrow roasted roots

And now to discuss the Chocolate Cave. About halfway into the grand ballroom that is Notch8 you smell it... it's not what the Rock is cooking it's chocolate. Maybe someone ordered something at a table nearby I thought. NO. It's an entire room at the back of the restaurant where the walls and every offering is chocolate. CHOCOLATE! I had to waddle down the steps due to over consumption, but there was still room for a chocolate chip cookie, red velvet cake, banana flambé, chocolate peanut brittle and truffles... omg you get it, they rolled us home! Luckily we live a 2 minute walk and no dogs had desecrated the sidewalk so we arrived at our condo clean and satisfied. When I lay in my bed I'm blessed to enjoy a beautiful view of Hotel Vancouver's stunning architecture and knowing Notch is contained within those walls makes me smile. And hungry, it also makes me hungry! Do yourself a favour and pay them a visit!

Valentine's Day Menu: TWG / February 12, 2017 by Jenn Chan

The TWG Tea Salon and Boutique is a gorgeous space and their chef Cliff Hohl is a very nice man. He was gracious enough to hang out with us table side and explain the various dishes that make up their Valentine's Day menu. He was so happy and proud to tell us that TWG was "officially Oceanwise as of yesterday". Oceanwise, if you're not familiar with it, is a sustainability program championed by the Vancouver Aquarium. Take a few minutes and give it a google, a very worthy cause!

The tea pairing, Mon Amour Tea, is one of the best I've tasted. Inhaling deeply from a tin of it left at our table, presumably for photography purposes, I harkened back to the days when Bubble Tape was first introduced. Remember that? Grape bubble tape, the kind bootlegged in my school yard, seriously, was the first thing that came to mind. Absolutely delicious!

Bain de Roses Tea infused sparkling wine cocktail

Have you ever had really, really good iced tea? Like the stuff plantation owners must have enjoyed on the wraparound decks of their palatial mansions? Love me Tea must be one of those! I wasn't raised extravagantly. I had everything I needed, but some years were tough with my mom going back to school for a time and my dad being unemployed for a time when Safeway closed the bread plant, where he plied his trade as a mechanical engineer, to bust his union and move the plant a little ways up the road. As such I have humble tastes: Nestle's Quik trumps any and all hot Chocolates at your froofy cafés and peanut butter is good on anything. This iced tea is not the sickeningly sweet, powdered offering of my youth, but a subtle, semi-sweet and refreshing upgrade. This is progress we can all get behind! Make iced tea great again!

TWG's scallops are the polar opposite of rubbery. Fresh, tender and flavourful. They really soak up the dashi broth and blend marvellously with the dragon fruit and "white desire" tea infusion. Korean brown rice is just better than regular rice, it just is. Again the dashi, the root of everything miso, soaks in and competes with the garlic for flavour supremacy. The time and effort spent to curl the carrots and cucumbers into tight spirals speaks volumes about TWG's commitment to presentation and elegance. Chef Hohl intimated as much, "the team is excited about this menu", he exclaimed between self deprecatingly deflecting praise and promising to bring us the meal's "Cliff notes" that he was having trouble finding thinking he'd left it on his "Cliffboard". Oh Cliff! I was proud to hear he had tried to model his summation after my writing. High praise from an artist to a financier dabbling in the written word and hardly an artist by any stretch of the imagination. Words are words, people use words everyday, but the culinary arts nourish people, inspire people and have the ability, with minimal exaggeration, to bridge cultural divides.

Pan-seared scallops complemented by a dashi broth infused with White Desire Tea

The dessert came out looking as glossy and beautiful as a $10,000 paint job on a $1,000,000 car. The vanilla bourbon ice cream is amongst the best, top five, ice creams of my life! Decadent, but with that natural vanilla flavour that reminded me of my first independent car ride with a peer as a 16 year old. That vanilla air freshener dangling off the rear view mirror signalled a freedom, an independence that vanilla always brings back for me!

Bain de Roses Tea infused mosse and raspberry confit, served with scoop of Vanilla Bourbon Tea infused ice cream and fresh berries

The TWG Tea Salon recently underwent an extensive renovation and the room is incredible! Brightly coloured containers of the world's best teas line the walls. Ornate tea pots encased in glass for the dining area and smiles everywhere. What makes you smile? For me it's kindness. For me it's joy. For me it's socializing. I promise you, from the bottom of my heart, that going to TWG will make you smile! Go hungry and leave happy!