Larry Nicolay and Lisa Henderson closed down their acclaimed RainCoast Café in Tofino in order to open up Latitude, a pan-American-themed restaurant on Main Street.

Credit: Doug Shanks

ON THE PLATE: A pan-American culinary adventure

Latitude
3250 Main, 604-875-6246, LatitudeOnMain.com
Food: 4 stars / Service: 4 stars / Atmosphere: 4 stars / Value: 4 stars

For many years, one of the best dining options in Tofino was the RainCoast Café, a small restaurant that took fresh, local ingredients and cleverly transformed them into affordable, Pacific Rim-travelled dishes — from B.C. oysters with citrus ponzu, to spot prawns dressed in plum wine and ginger, to authentic pad thai, to searingly aromatic nasi goreng. My heart sank when I learned it was closing down last year, but then it rose when I learned why: The duo behind the RainCoast, chef Lisa Henderson and Larry Nicolay, were moving to Vancouver and opening a restaurant, to be called Latitude, on Main Street.

The pair took over the former Budapest Restaurant location, at 3250 Main, last October, and employed Rob Edmonds and David Nicolay of Evoke International Design (the firm behind good-looking Vancouver rooms including Sanafir, Glowbal, and the relocated Irish Heather) to spin an aesthetic transformation. The design team are also co-owners of the Cascade Room and Habit Lounge a few blocks to the north, which would make them competitors if it weren’t for the fact that Larry and David are brothers.

It took Henderson and Nicolay eight months to open Latitude (due in part to a problematic roof), but all is sorted now. The finished product, just a month old as of this writing, is not particularly large (roughly 45 seats), but it’s a sizable stylistic departure from the local mom-and-pop eateries and yawn-inducing hipster joints that rule the neighbourhood roost. It’s like chancing upon a mint-condition Citroen from the late ’60s on a used car lot full of tired old clunkers: It might look out of place, you think, and there’s a chance it won’t work, but it sure is pretty.

Thankfully, it does work. And, as per the Evoke way, it’s modern and very cleanly wrought, with nary a curve to be seen but for beautiful chairs of smooth wood and arched chrome. The space is fronted by a large sliding window, so on summer nights the first few hundred square feet (including a six-seat bar) feel refreshingly al fresco. Beyond the bar are three comfy, crimson-coloured booths raised on a platform and bordered by wispy grey curtains. Opposite, a long banquette swaddled in black leather and lined with thick, darkly stained wooden tabletops leads to a rear wall covered in hundreds of small wooden blocks. Look closely and you’ll see that each one has been stained with a ring of red wine, as if from the bottom of a rested glass.

The food concept is arguably one of the best and most original on the east side, in which wines from the Americas are matched with food of the Americas — from the waters of the Queen Charlottes to Tierra del Fuego. (If it had a conceptual counterpart, it would be the west side’s Baru Latino.) This gives the kitchen plenty of room to find excellence without deviating from the theme. The 17-item menu is anchored by small plates, but there are several larger ones on offer, too. Prices hover in the $9 to $18 range, with nothing exceeding $20.

Soccas ($11), not unlike a crêpe but made with chickpea flour, are stuffed with local hand-peeled shrimp and sautéed greens, their muted flavours lifted by the emulsified cool of avocado crema and the subtle crunch of radish sprouts. If you want an all-in-one zinc, fibre, folate, and protein power-up, try the chickpea fries ($7); these are molded into girthy Jenga blocks, and served with smoked-paprika mayonnaise in a coronet. To round out the intro plates, I tried some thinly cut, intensely flavoured ancho-seared albacore tuna on a pleasingly acidic and spicy escabeche of jalapeño and fennel. This was the smartest $8 I’d spent in a while. Sauced with a delicious orange smear of piri piri and annatto oil, its vibrant colour and taste were amplified by a glass of 2006 Ex Nihilo Riesling from Okanagan Falls.

Moving onto the larger plates, my knife glided through neatly arranged slices of flank steak prepped in the Argentine asado-style, with aromatic chimichurri applied like a poultice ($17). “Smashed” new potatoes, baked with Mexican cotija cheese and squirty cherry tomatoes (fresh and jumpy from the heated stress of the pan), finished the dish — one I’d be very glad to have again. A filet of halibut, lightly flavoured with avocado, came sided with buttered radishes and two tasty fritters of quinoa and more of that cotija. Very light, delicately flavoured, and not at all bad for $19.

The food at Latitude doesn’t overreach, which I feared it might, given the broad nature of the restaurant’s theme. Taken together, the menu reads like the distilled version of a much lengthier one, the result of a good deal of editing done by smart people. Same goes for the list of pan-American beers and wines, which scrolls down like a grand liquid safari from Kelowna to Chile’s Limari Valley.

In all, bravo! If there’s anything here that I shouldn’t have liked, I didn’t find it. Score one for Main Street.