For months, I’ve been meaning to go to Social at Le Magasin. It’s a two-part restaurant, with a little bistro on Water Street and a butchershop/deli facing West Cordova. I keep walking by the bistro and seeing signs for oysters and cheap martinis. I haven’t even been in there, and they already know what I like!
I’ve heard great things about their sandwiches, so it was about time that I tried one. They’re good value – I got a small sandwich for $6.75 and only managed to eat half of it. Each sandwich also comes with a bag of homemade potato chips, which are delightfully salty and ever-so-slightly burnt. It’s a daring but tasty move.
I had the house roast beef on brown with dijon mustard and aioli, topped with Havarti, pickles and banana peppers. The roast beef was really moist, flavourful and tender, and they did a great job of slicing it really thinly. One of my pet peeves with sandwiches is that most places don’t slice the meat finely enough, and then you end up with a big mouthful of meat.
(Let’s just forget that I wrote “big mouthful of meat”, shall we?)
Anyway. The inside of the sandwich was lovely. The roast beef, the cheese, the pickles, the mustard, the aioli – it all tasted really good. I wish I had had some horseradish, but that’s about it. My major complaint is that the bread was awful. It was tasteless, dry, and crumbly – almost like it had been sliced first thing in the morning and then laid out to dry until the moment I ordered my sandwich. I would have been less noticeable if the bread had been toasted or grilled but, well, it wasn’t toasted or grilled.
Why would they take so much care to make me a beautiful sandwich, and then give me two pieces of styrofoam masquerading as bread? Why do something so sacreligious?
It just makes me sad.
So.cial at Le Magasin
332 Water Street
Vancouver, BC
604-669-4488
www.socialatlemagasin.com
I noted last time I was in that they were using different bread. (Although in my case it was just fine – the sandwich was delicious as ever and in fact I actually liked the taste a bit better as the bread was less “herb-ie”, but I agree the texture wasn’t as good. When I enquired I was told that they were having trouble keeping a baker on staff because the hours are graveyard due to the need to use all the ovens for the bread. They tried to get Terra to bake their bread but Terra will not do someone else’s recipe, only their own. In the mean time they are bringing their bread in. This might be a good nudge to try and get that bakers position filled….
This is mostly why I never became a bread specialist. I had a hard enough time working in a bakery and starting at 5 am, but the mere idea of having to work graveyard shifts and being at the mercy of a microorganism (that is, yeast) was just too much to deal with.