Unpretentious eatery reminds us what a real French bistro should strive for: providing satisfying food and making regulars feel at home
The freezing cold wouldn’t have been so bad if the hard rain wasn’t being whipped into our faces by fierce winds. But there was comfort on the horizon for my wife and I as we dodged traffic while crossing Kingsway at Fraser. Our destination, for the fourth time in as many months, was Les Faux Bourgeois, and it beckoned like an illuminated grail promising warmth, respite and a half-hour wait for elbow-to-elbow seats at a packed bar tended by one.
Vancouver is blessed with many capable French restaurants, ranging from high end to the very approachable. To be perfectly honest, most appeal to me more than Les Faux. I’d pick Lumière, Le Crocodile, Bistrot Bistro and a host of others over it on any given night. Why? To put it plainly, the aforementioned restaurants offer better food and service. Nevertheless, I still see Le Faux’s appeal clearly enough to not shake my head at those WE readers who voted it “Best French” in this year’s Best of the City poll.
No other restaurant in Vancouver accurately represents how we imagine a typical French bistro to be. It is loud, packed, cozy and so inconsistently lit that it’s like dining under a weak strobe (the lights constantly flicker, presumably because the electrical current feeding them is bled by every cycle of the kitchen’s industrial dishwasher). The décor could have been plucked from a period movie set or copied from a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, and you’re usually served by someone with a thick French accent.
Another thing working in favour of Les Faux, which boasts a fairly deep wine and beer menu, is the paucity of comparable full-service restaurants nearby. On every visit that I’ve ever paid it, Les Faux has been packed. The people inside — many of them from the Fraser ’hood — are put at ease by an unstuffy atmosphere that screams egalité, liberté and fraternité so genuinely that it’s easy to imagine it raging on the rue Desnouettes in Paris instead of across the street from the local Mini-Mart and Canadian Bible Society.
If I have any real complaint about the space, it’s that few rooms offer more tangible proof that while there are always good seats and bad ones, there are also horrible ones. If you are unlucky enough to be led to one of the tightly squeezed tables of two between the bar and the banquette that runs the length of the room, opt to wait for an alternative by citing your desire to enjoy your meal without the occasional crotch or ass in your face courtesy of tray-laden servers and tipsy guests.
But never mind that. Is the food good? Sure. For starters, the french onion soup is adequately hot, properly stratified with Gruyère and bread and puckeringly salty ($8); they don’t skimp on their meaty, toothsome pork pate ($10); the albacore tuna in the Nicoise salad is seared beautifully; and the Alsatian tart flambé with lardons and crème fraiche is now much better than I remember it being months ago when its puff pastry base was pitifully flaccid ($10).
It’s the same middling story with the main courses. They nail the long-simmered, red wine-soaked Coq au Vin — the meat falls apart gorgeously and comes saddled with perfectly cooked fingerling potatoes ($18). The salmon, flavoured with dill and mustard on a steaming mound of saffron-infused mashed potatoes, is just as satisfactory ($17), as is the sausage-heavy, gut-sticking white bean cassoulet ($17). If they do any dish better than most, it’s the tricky-to-cook hangar steak, which they anoint with a goodly glisten of herb butter and plate with very good frites ($17). It’s bold flavour lingers and its texture makes other cuts of beef justifiably jealous.
So while they rep the classics well enough, it’s entirely debatable as to whether or not any of it is worthy of celebration. I don’t mean that derisively in the least, for the food is exactly as good as it needs to be. A bistro lauded as being representative of its milieu will not come close to blowing away its diners with expressive knife skills and exacting, harmonious flavour combinations for there is little art or nuance to quality bistro fare.
It should comfort rather than wow, not unlike a capable pub in an English seaside summer retreat, complete with charming but disinterested service and the need to turn tables quickly to accommodate the steady lineup at the door.
When put together as a complete package, Les Faux Bourgeois serves to remind us that a real French bistro shouldn’t strive to be fabulous. It should instead aim to satisfy and make those who frequent it to feel at home. In this it succeeds absolutely. (663 E. 15th, 604-873-9733, LesFauxBourgeois.com)
