Dineout is in FULL effect! My first dinner was at Wildebeest, located on Hastings just a little past Cambie. I’ve heard so many great things about Wildebeest, it was one of the top choices on my list of places to try. Their dineout menu is $38.

Our friends Jen and Ben (who we affectionately call Bennifer) joined us for this meal. When we arrived at the restaurant, I noticed the rustic and long, narrow space they have. We sat right across their open kitchen, where we watched a handful of chefs and servers make our meals. They had a great system going on and it didn’t seem like they were too flustered with the busy DineOut evening they had. Our server welcomed us and informed us that we could only do either the dine out menu or an abbreviated a la carte menu. I was hoping to do DineOut and order some signature dishes that some people on Twitter recommended to me, but I guess I’ll have to try and go back again for check out their Smoked olives and sweetbreads!

To start off, I ordered the Smoked Salmon Roulade. It’s served with orange-infused pumpking, black pepper creme fraiche and arugula. What I liked about this dish was the varying flavours. It wasn’t so varied that it didn’t compliment each other, but it was definitely an experience for my palate.

The smoked salmon is delicious, it’s lightly smoked and tasted quite good with the creme fraiche. The black pepper in the creme fraiche isn’t overbearing, almost subtle. The same can be said for the slivers of pumpkin, which have a very slight sweet tangy taste due to the orange.

Jen ordered the Poached Farm Egg (served with Heritage onions, sour dough bread and Alpine Gold cheddar). I didn’t manage to snap a nice photo of her dish, but it seemed like Ben would’ve preferred this dish instead of the Smoked Salmon.

The pacing of our food was fantastic too, we didn’t have to wait too long in between.

For our main dishes, the boys went with the Albacore Tuna Tempura and the ladies ordered the Natural Angus Beef Short Rib.

The Albacore Tuna Tempura was a very cool dish. You could almost say it was a deep fried sushi roll. The tuna was perfectly seared tataki style, but wrapped in crispy delicious seaweed. The tuna sat in a bowl of enoki mushrooms, rounds of radish and a smoked dashi broth. I didn’t get to try any of the veggies or the dashi but I really enjoyed the Tuna.

For my main, I had the Natural Angus Beef Short Rib. It’s served with rutabaga, brussel sprouts and sweet and sour shallow jus. I have to be honest that this is the first time I’ve ever had Rutabaga. It’s slightly sweet and almost tastes like sweet yam. The brussel sprouts were sprinkled onto the dish and they were crispy and a bit salty, which was nice. Now to the main event – the short rib. It was so tender and juicy! It was so easy to cut into and literally melted in your mouth. The boys kind of wished they ordered the short ribs instead!

Finally, dessert. Jen ordered the Lemon Cake served with parsnip and white chocolate mousse, stout-infused tapioca.

I ordered the Wildebeest ‘Cheesecake’ served with Blackberry sorbet and a graham crumble. There is a reason why there are apostrophes/quotations around this menu item. The cheesecake is not actual cheesecake, but more of a light, foamy cheesecake substance – kind of similar to meringue. The blackberry sorbet adds a great tang to it and the graham crumble is sprinkled on top, giving it an interesting texture all together.

All in all, I did enjoy this experience and I’d like to come back to try their full menu when the festival is over. Their choices for their DineOut menu are great and do showcase the Chef’s talents – as I find that with many other DineOut restaurants that their menus are very uninspired. I left with great tastes tingling in my mouth and satisfied!

Food: 

Service: 

Value: 

Ambiance: 

OVERALL: 

Check out their website here.

Wildebeest on Urbanspoon