Let’s Go For Dinner: r.tl – CLOSED

Update Aug 3, 2013: This restaurant is now closed.

It has been a while since I’ve been to r.tl.  I was first introduced to this restaurant when they held a foodie night early last year.  I had a good impression of the place but never got the chance to go back until now, as my good cousin came to visit from Hong Kong, Pretty Sis and I took her out for dinner in Yaletown.  Also since the introduction of the Canada Line, it’s much more convenient for me to get down there as I don’t have to worry about parking.

And as the title suggests, this is also a “Let’s Go For Dinner” participating restaurant.  If you don’t already know what this is, basically you can get gift certificates to certain restaurants for 50% off.  With a shameless plug…please use my referral code RAF315892 if you decide to sign up!  We’ll both get some goodies!

As mentioned before, they change up their menu approximately every 3 months (but I haven’t been keeping track for obvious reasons).  For this visit, they are featuring Basque (BQ), Morocco (MC) and B.C. (BC).

Not sure if they serve bread at the beginning of the meal since we ordered a bread from the menu.  This is the House made Moroccan Spiced Bread ($6).  Weird thing was, the name clearly suggests Moroccan but the menu says it’s BC style.  Perhaps it’s a typo.

Anyways this was served with a caraway & cardamom butter.  It was very fragrant and the cardamom aroma suggests a sweet taste to the butter but it was just a mild sweetness.  In fact, I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it or it was in fact sweet-ish.  Nonetheless it was very good.

The bread itself was also spiced and made perfectly.  It was served warm and the crust was lightly crisp which is perfect for me as I normally do not eat the crust of the bread served at these types of restaurants since I find them too hard.  But again, this was perfect, the insides were soft and fluffy.  However I suggest that you eat this up while it’s warm since it get kind of chewy and tougher as it cools.

The menu also offers a 3-course $25 menu.  And the way you choose is that some of the dishes are numbered 1, 2, and 3.  You pick one of each number and that makes up your 3-course menu.  We ended up doing 2 of those and then picking 2 more items.

Above was a 1st course of the $25 menu.  They are basically skewers but is decribed as “Spikes served pintxos style (BQ)” (normally $3.50 each, which is pretty expensive but it’s Yaletown…).  They have 6 choices and we picked the Lamb Sirloin in a lime mint confit.

The meat was very juicy and tender.  The lime mint, however, was not very evident.  I did wish we had more though.

The other 1st course was the Bacalhau fritters (BQ) (normally $8) which is something we had before at Foodie night, only that time it was considered Portuguese style.  It is a deep-fried salt cod, potato and onion mash served with a pretty spicy piri piri sauce.

It was better this time for me, but I’m not sure why.  However we did comment on how dark it looked, almost as if it’s burnt (but it wasn’t, probably just old oil or dark spices).