La Casita - Gastown

Loreto is the rare brunch room that earns its Mexican-inspired billing without leaning on cliché.

Northern Cafe has occupied a lumberyard building in South Vancouver, which makes it one of the city's more improbable breakfast institutions — vintage decor, an industrial address that keeps the tourist foot traffic low, and a community…

Climb to the second-floor cantina above Denman Street and you land in a room that knows exactly what it is: an open kitchen on one side, a colorful mural of cactus against a pink-maroon sky on another, sombreros pinned up like the place…

There's a small ceremony to eating here that most Vancouver hot pot rooms skip: the cloisonné copper pots, the charcoal glowing underneath, the sense that dinner is an event rather than a transaction.

AM Cafe is doing something quietly radical in Vancouver's vegetarian scene: it refuses to be precious about it.