Credit: DARSHAN STEVENS

Gourmet Comfort Food

Detour over to Devour

Sometimes it’s difficult to decide what to eat at a restaurant and most often it’s due to a menu being too big. Occasionally, however, I’ll come across an eatery whose menu is small yet everything on it looks so good—and is so reasonably priced—that it’s hard to choose. This was the case the other day at lunch, when we visited Devour, Victoria’s newest gourmet, comfort-food hotspot.

Housed in the tiny Broughton Street space that was once the home of Café Madrid, old-world Spanish charm has been replaced with a vibrant, modern, white-and-orange paint job, recycled wood countertops and silver pots of rosemary, sage and well-picked-over oregano (obviously not just for decoration) on the bright windowsill overlooking the sidewalk seating. You’d hardly believe it’s the same place. The day’s menu is posted on the window and again inside, and local brews, a selection of wines and French-press coffee are available from other blackboards. A display case holds fresh sandwiches in paper bags ready to go and home-baked goodies just out of the oven—such as rhubarb upside-down muffins—await hungry mouths.

When we finally decided what to eat, passing over a gorgeous looking halibut in phyllo pastry, a tempting roast beef sandwich on baguette and a “chef’s choice” meat-and-cheese plate (I love those for lunch), we squeezed ourselves in and waited—but not for long. It appears that the two chef/owner/servers, professionally clad in black chef’s uniforms, do it all themselves here, from taking your order at the counter, to working their magic in the kitchen, to clearing up when you’re done. Doing it all yourself is the best way to ensure quality control, and it shows—especially when it comes to the food.

First, our Indonesian lamb curry ($9.50) was awesome. The generous portion of lamb was cooked to melt-in-your-mouth tenderness, and presented on a piece of warm roti flatbread with a chickpea salad. The curry had a distinctive light spicy flavour, and to our delight, the chickpea salad was not made from your average canned, slightly soggy chickpeas, but featured a slightly smaller, dark reddish brown variety purchased in dried form at a deli up the road. In fact, everything appears to made from scratch here, in small batches, with love and care.

One of the reasons the term comfort food can accurately be applied is that many of the menu items are common enough, and recognizable, yet here take on a life of their own. For example, the humble tuna sandwich has evolved into a flaked white tuna, hard-boiled egg, and shredded radish sandwich on onion focaccia bread ($6.50). An amazing deal for the price, the bread was as fresh and soft as can be and the filling also included a black olive tapenade for a salty tang.

Another classic, the Devour spinach salad ($6.50/$9) is a good size for lunch, showcasing whole leaves of local spinach, tender pungent arugula, gently cooked bacon, julienne carrot, a hard-boiled egg, a slice of baguette and a generous portion of Blue Juliet cheese, one of the nicest looking and tasting local artisan cheeses around. A goat cheese from the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company, it’s surface-ripened with a lacy grey pattern for lovers of blue cheese, but white and creamy on the inside for those who also adore Camembert. Truly the best of both worlds, it alone was worth the price of the salad.

Speaking of price, nothing on the lunch menu was over $10. In fact, this place verifies something I have always believed but only occasionally seen in action—amazing, healthy, beautiful looking gourmet food doesn’t have to cost any more than average or bad food. Kitchen skills, taste, creativity and knowledge, once you obtain them, are free. It doesn’t cost more to know which knife to use for which job, what the right amount of salt is or how to create and present a dish with aesthetic flair. True, it sometimes costs more to use local meat and produce, but this isn’t stopping Devour’s owners from providing us with superb food, much of it locally sourced, at great prices.

During these tough economic times people still want to eat out—but no one wants to waste their hard earned money on so-so food. And the good news is Devour is not just a breakfast and lunch place, but stays open through the dinner hour on Thursday and Friday for the theatre-, concert- or movie-going crowd . . . and better yet, brings us brunch on Saturdays. See you there. I’ll be the one holding up the line—trying to decide what to have. M

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Devour
762 Broughton
Monday-Wednesday 9am-5pm
Thursday-Friday 9am-8pm
Saturday brunch 9:30am-3pm
250-590-3231• devour.ca