Author: Joe32

I first went to I Cafe when it first opened, and was blown away by the vibe and setting, and the cool and unique menu offerings. It was Asian-Fusion-With-A-Twist. Alas, apparently it has changed.... The Cambie/Broadway area is hardly an epicurean destination...a vast plethora of...average restaurants pumping out calories for the Hospital/Cancer Clinic/Office crowd in the area. For a time, I Cafe stood head and shoulders above the crowd, but it seems to have slumped. It is now, at best, a very ordinary Hong Kong style Western Food cafe. In a city where Asian - especially Cantonese - food is king, it should not be hard to put together a good quality fusion meal. The first struggle in getting into I Cafe is finding a place to park. Due the efforts of Mayor Moonbeam and his anti-car Stormtroopers, coupled with extortion level rates in the lots around the health facilities, finding a spot to duck into for a bit was all but impossible. We finally found a spot in an alley three blocks away, and were fortunate to find our car still there when we returned, absent that irritating little piece of paper. One of our dishes was one of the lunch specials, touted as a grilled pork chop with egg on rice, with mushroom sauce. It came with a drink (I had Hong Kong coffee, which was...okay) and a bun with soup of the day, a borscht. The three bite little bun was good. The borscht was a few bits of uninspired cabbage and carrots in a ketchup based broth, with a colour normally reserved for classic sweet and sour pork. The pork chop was okay, the rice was okay, the egg was...okay. The mushroom sauce used the same ketchup as the borscht, just not as watered down. And there was a great deal of it, drowning pretty much everything in that same distinctive radioactive orange hue. The other dish was some-kind-of-meat ramen noodles....instant noodles in a tasteless broth, with some frightened bits of mammal trapped by those noodles.... On the up side, the two young ladies who served us were friendly, smiling and attentive...that would be the only up side for today. It was not terrible...if you want some quick calories and don't much care what you have, only a little bit overpriced, its fine...it is just not the cool place with the fun menu it used to be. And if you truly want a Hong Kong Family Restaurant experience, there are dozens of better places....make the trip to Coquitlam or to Richmond, or head down Main Street. Disappointed. Sigh.