The Farmer’s Apprentice

I was hoping that The Farmer’s Apprentice would be the highlight during my Week in Vancouver as it was recommended by a local friend and several food bloggers, but I was kist sp disappointed. It might went down in my «travel to eat» memoir as One of the Top 10 worst set menu meals I ever had.
Booking via Bookenda was easy and we got an instant confirmation. I already knew there are only set menu options with «omnivore» $ 55 and «herbivore» $ 50. Since there were 2 of us, we ended up ordering both to share.
All I had to say that the chef worked too hard trying to bring different flavours and elements together without any balance in taste. I really appreciate how local and seasonal ingredients are used to create each dish. But the bottom line, the food has to taste good. I think the portion was fine as a taster menu as too much mediocre food just means too much food.
During the meal, we just kept asking ourselves why? why we paying for these? why we ended up eating here? Did the chef taste the food? Maybe we just not have the sophistication to understand?
The only thing we enjoyed was our dessert… Beewax Ice Cream, Mutsu Apple, Milk was just so clean tasting and refreshing!
Service was attentive and I love the small cozy vibe here. I just wish the food taste better.

If you are into paying roughly $ 55-​$ 70per plate for a set menu to receive tiny portions of over complicated dishes that lack any real punch & to be surrounded by 55 – 60 year old people then this is the spot for you!. Pair that with very average service and you have the famed «farmers apprentice»
Please don’t get me wrong I am not just slamming this place but we heard great things and finally got there only to leave hungry and about $ 200 lighter in the pocket!. We eat a lot of great food and cook very well as well and this place is simply over rated!

We had arrived in the afternoon for brunch. Oh what a delightful place! The sun was shining through the window, restaurant ambient was up beat with love songs from the 90’s
.a bit too romantic and awkward for our liking… but we’re here for the food. So here it goes… my dinner companion had the beef tongue hash (yeah.sounds not so delicious, however it was quite well done!). I had the pink albacore tuna on a bed of quinoa topped with soft boiled eggs. He ordered a third dish and it was the beef carpaccio… not sliced, but mince. It was different nonetheless very fresh. Will definitely be back!

Delicious amazing quality food prepared with care that’s reasonably priced. Great service!

Not impressed with the fact that it’s a set menu ONLY (and not cheap!) The only choice you get is «omnivore» $ 55 which includes ~6 dishes and «herbivore» $ 50 which is ~6 dishes but all vegetarian dishes. I ordered the omnivore and was surprised on how small the portions were.
Example 1: one dish consisted of 2 mini carrots + horseradish dip
Example 2: one dish consisted of 1 scallop + 6.5 Brussel sprouts.
Yes the dishes were good quality but not for $ 55+tax/tip. I’m usually about quality over quantity too.
It took 3 hours to bring out all of the food. I wasn’t full when I left the restaurant either probably because it took so long :(.
I probably won’t be back unless they start serving individual dishes (non set menu) because some of the pictures on here look awesome but I thought the food I received yesterday was underwhelming and disappointing. I’m a bit upset about saying that since I’ve been looking forward to coming here for a couple of years.

Updated 25Oct2015 — set menu only alert
I came back here 1 week after I tried it for the first time (experience below) because I thought their food was decent. However, in just 7 days they have converted to a set menu only restaurant! They no longer have plates to share which I enjoyed a lot last time. All their shared plates are now only served in their more casual store (Grape and Soda). So we decided to give the set menu a try since we were already there. First off, it is quite expensive for the amount of food you get (~$ 60 for a set menu per person). There were around 7 dishes on their set menu, and each portion was extremely tiny. Because the portions were so small and that the food only comes after everyone finishes their previous dish, we got hungrier as the meal went on. Maybe it was because I was still hungry after and therefore, didn’t feel satisfied or because the tiny portions didn’t allow me to enjoy enough of their food, I was quite disappointed with my experience this visit. I would consider visiting Grape and Soda store to have their shared plates again, but would likely not come back to Farmer’s Apprentice because of the change.
— — —
We finally got to try this place after 2 failed attempts to make a reservation. Our success was due to us making the reservation 1 week ahead… Yes folks this place is small and they get busy! But it was worth all the effort. We went with 4 people and the server recommended us getting 6 plates from the «to share» section of the menu. Since their portions were quite small, we could have added 2 more plates if we hadn’t decided to stop there. This place deserves the four stars for how fresh their ingredients are (from their salads to their fish). Otherwise, I thought how the dishes were made and ingredients were paired were quite average, but nevertheless, good. The store is quite small so it is not suitable for large parties, unless you make a special request ahead of time. Overall, this place has great ambience, service and food. I would definitely come back again!

Just came back from eating dinner at the Farmer’s Apprentice. Still hungry and very unsatisfied. For $ 55 tasting menu I expect something better than boiled black beans, leeks and mushrooms. Some kind of salad with foam on top. Potatoes with more mysterious foam on top. Some sort of celeriac decorated with grapes. Dessert was a bowl of grapes in ginger water. Very pretentious, I will look around my fridge for something to eat now.

This place is very cute and has a wonderfully intimate atmosphere. The omnivore multicourse dinner was extremely filling and was a very unique experience. All the produce was packed with flavor, and the portions were generous considering the number of courses. I think my favorite was the halibut, although there were surprising things I liked about each dish, really. The dessert itself wasn’t as memorable as the carrot cake bites that came out with the bill, though. Those were heavenly. I don’t eat as many veggies as I should, and often don’t seek them out, but eating here exposed me to tons of unique flavor combinations that were new and interesting. I would recommend this place, especially to veggie lovers.

Quick Tips: Menu is constantly changing, but if you check the day of, you may get a preview for what is available. They always have a tasting menu option, but your entire table must join, so be prudent on who you invite to dinner! Highlight items are the onion butter, sablefish and potato gnocchi. If you are doing a la carte, about 2 snacks, 2 vegetable grains, 2 seafood and one meat should do it for a table of 6. Add a cheese plate and dessert on there if you are feeling decadent.
Food: One item that consistently seems to be on the menu and seems to be consistently amazing is the onion butter (with a side of naturally leavened bread). Delicious! We started our dinner with a cheese plate, leavened bread and onion butter, and olives. We then ordered the gnocchi, wild and cultivated greens, sablefish, and beef sirloin. I wasn’t a huge fan of the sirloin, but plenty of people at our table seemed to like it.
Service: Very knowledgeable and friendly wait staff. If you don’t know what to get, ask questions and they have great insight.
Ambiance: Fairly casual, but eclectic ambiance. Don’t worry about dressing to impress.
Random aside that has nothing to do with the restaurant: You got to love when your family/​family friends treat and you get to try a fabulous meal on the generosity of your loved ones. Special shout to the Sanampudi family for this great experiences!

My friends and I ordered three different dishes yesterday. I tried the pulled pork with buttermilk biscuits and fried egg and my two friends tried salads. All of the food tastes good and fresh. Knowing that the food was organic. I did not feel special about eating the food though. For my dish, it surprised me that their can pulled pork was not too salty. Buttermilk biscuits were great.
My friends were late, so I had to wait for them sitting at the restaurant by myself. A staff asked if I would like to drink something else until my friends arrived. I ordered a cup of coffee. The coffee was Elysian. It was alright.
The kitchen was open and clean that customers could see everything inside. Many chefs and helpers as well as waitresses were working together.

Came here numerous times since my first review. The ambiance and layout are great — very quaint and social. The crowd is always pleasant. The service is quite good — the first time must have been a one-​off. The food is always interesting and mostly delicious, but the price point is still too high for the portions.

Last night was my first time at Farmer’s Apprentice for dinner and unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be back (at least not for the tasting menu), 3 friends and myself all ordered the tasting menu (2 veg/​2 omni) which went from good, to underwhelming to downright bad. The highlight was the amuse bouche which would best be described as a turnip taco which was fresh and super tasty, the chanterelles with green beans and corn which was brilliant but served at a temperature that was so blazingly hot that I almost spit it out. The fish course and salad course were both perfectly prepared but they left very little impression as I could really remember them today.
The two major fails in the meal were the beef course, which was served with a «Thai Style» salad. If i had to sum up the course in one word it would be «disgusting». There was so much mint in the dish that it was as if I had just licked a car air freshener, even after removing all of the mint that I could find it left a terrible taste in my mouth and ruined the course for me. Fortunately the bread course was served directly after which helped cleanse my palate, to bad it was served at a temperature so hot that I burnt my thumb picking it up off of the plate (I actually have a blister on my thumb this morning), it also could have really benefited from some more salt and fell a little into the bland category.
Dessert was also just ok, a mint sorbet (I’ld already had my share of mint at that point) and sliver of peach (which could have benefited from having the skin removed, as it was quite difficult to eat with my teeny dessert spoon.
The best part of the meal with the tiny bite of carrot cake that was served with the bill. It was probably one of the best things that I’ve ever eaten, and it was only a 1″ square.
Dinner with drinks came to about $ 100/​person which is about right for that level of service but I think next time I will try someplace else.

After hearing such great things about Farmers Apprentice, I was a bit disappointed with my dining experience. While the atmosphere was great (my fav part about dinner, aside from the company), the food was not as good as I had hoped — definitely very overrated!
I was unimpressed with our server — she gave us attitude and was unfriendly towards our table. Considering the amount of money we spent, I would have expected more.

Beautiful and well-​thought out dishes characterize this tiny little nook of a restaurant.
The dishes are small portions and meant to be shared tapas style. If you want your own entrée — I would suggest not coming here. The other thing is: make reservations ahead of time and be on schedule. They normally change over tables every 2 hours. We couldn’t try dessert because of this. A walk-​in is likely a 1.5hr wait. The service is so-​so. It’s not the best, so I’ve given this place a ⁴⁄₅. They try… but I think it’s easy for the servers to get frustrated having to maneuver a cramped space and stick tightly to the 2hr table changeovers. It’s more like project management than serving!
Their menu changes on a regular if not daily basis so it’s difficult to write a review of specific items, but I can tell you that each dish is well balanced in flavour, visually appealing, and well executed.
For example, we had a sablefish topped with furikake with a side of miso infused vegetables. It was delicate, very flavorful and absolutely divine.
We also had their famous sweet onion butter (which is swirled with olive oil in a dish) and house made bread which a lot of people talk about and did not disappoint.
Then they also have smoked olives, which in my opinion is an understated star side dish.
We rounded off our meal with their version of a Panzanella salad, lemon infused octopus, pillowy soft gnocchi, and an unusual dish of fried rice with white kimchi & duck hearts (my partner loved it. I thought it might have been a bit too pickly and with too many hearts — though the hearts were really well prepared).
For French (fusion), the dishes were light, unlike traditional French which leaves you feeling heavy in the stomach.
Their cocktails are great. Try the Journalist or better yet their Caesar made with horseradish infused vodka.
Lastly, don’t forget to check out a framed photograph hidden in the back. It’s a grainy black & white image of Kits beach back in the 1920s, and a lovely adornment to the space.
Next time I’ll have to come back and try Grapes & Soda (their mini bar) next door.

Food is consistently somewhere between strong and amazing.
There’s a little bit of pretentiousness here (with the rotating menu that tends to neglect things we regularly come for like, an omelette or pancake). Servers are generally very professional though sometimes a little chilly — I’m still trying to figure out their vibe and where it comes from. Qualifying as an item on their menu requires having at least one word that native English speakers are unlikely to know. And they change their hours occasionally without updating the website, which tends to, you know, strand people.
But dammit, it’s pretty awesome almost every time.
Standby favorite items are the biscuit and jam, and the cappuccino. If there’s pork belly on the menu, get it.

Came here 6 months ago and I have to say the dinner was awesome. Ordered the poached egg, albacore tuna, dry aged angus strip loin, and other things as well. I have to say this place is super small and super busy. It came to about $ 60 per person. Its a place where you get tapas size but not tapa size price. Food was delicious except at that time, the poached eggs had a piece of nasty hair in it. However, the server was really nice and offered us a free dish of octopus (which this is no longer on the menu now). I don’t like octopus but according to my friend it was delicious. Service was pretty good.
The place is a open concept meaning you can see the chef cooking and it makes you feel nice to know that everything is fresh and the kitchen is clean.
I would come back on special occasion.

We had a medium-​sized group dinner (7 people) at The Farmer’s Apprentice recently, on a weeknight in the mid-​evening. It was a mixed bag.
First, I’ll preface this by saying that I really, really enjoy well-​prepared and innovative food, but I’m pretty much «up to here» with the current standard level of preciousness and fussiness I encounter at places like this. So much of the experience is designed for a very narrow selection of diner — self-​regarding, affected, etc. — that it can be actually off-​putting to be merely a well-​experienced diner with a decent palate.
Anyway, having said that up front, I think the food on its own was 3−4÷5 stars; the ambience was 4/​5, but the service was ²⁄₅.
There are enough reviews that I don’t need to go plate-​by-​plate, but the warm bread and onion butter at the start was genuinely delicious, and the only thing there was enough of (and seconds of). Some of the other dishes were real winners (the white salmon, for example, although it came with a BS story that I guess was supposed to heighten our enjoyment of the dish), others were interesting but not quite successful. But overall the experience, food-​wise, was good.
I also enjoyed the décor and the ability to sit with a decent-​sized group in a small place. It’s comfortable and cozy but you’re not totally on top of one another.
But the service… honestly, it was both poor and poorly thought-​out. The poor bits were the complete sense of irregularity to everything — when it would come, would we get more water, etc.
The poorly thought-​out bits were actually worse. First, it’s downright stupid to have a prix fixe dinner that you then BREAK DOWN BY INDIVIDUAL FOOT ITEM on the bill, leaving your group of customers to try to decipher what the %@&$! is going on and how much they owe each. Never mind that we weren’t even asked about splitting the bill — an easy call (supposedly) on a prix fixe menu.
Second, if you’re a restaurant that serves preciously prepared food in eensy-​weensy portions, designed to be delicately consumed and appreciated — then you shouldn’t PLATE SAID FOOD ON COMMUNAL PLATES. Which of those five tiny carrots is mine? There are too many to be one per person, not enough for two per person. What the hell is the point of instilling a kind of Lord of the Flies mentality in your customers? Just give us individual plates, or otherwise serve family-​style portions. You can’t combine the worst of those two things.
In the end, we left having had some very nice food, but feeling pretty annoyed at the actual experience, I’m sorry to report. I really think that it would have been a significantly better experience if the serving of the food had been more logical, individual, and clearly tallied.

2.5−3 stars
Do not come here if you’re hungry! Or else be prepared to order an extra dish (or you can plan to stop by the nearby Beaucoup for some pastries after!)
I have mixed feelings on Farmers Apprentice. It follows the farm to table concept that is currently trendy. The menu items change and the items are unique… I have only been for brunch, and it’s nice to have options beyond the typical eggs and French toast.
I had the sablefish with poached eggs. The eggs were nicely done as well as the potatoes. The sablefish was nice but not memorable. Presentation was good. The portions were tiny though! I was still quite hungry after spending $ 20 here for brunch. Service is ok; I would consider it below average at this price range.
Not sure I’d be willing to come back for brunch. But I’m curious how dinner is here and will update if I do.

I read some reviews were pretty good and foods were great, however, my experience was totally nay!
I tried to find out the menu on the website, however, it didn’t seem like update after July. In addition, the menu items are so limited. I still like to check it out.
We went there for brunch on Sun and our disappointment started right we arrived. The waitress told us around 20 mins wait and eventually we waited for 50 mins!
Our coffee was disgusting! Any gas station coffee would be better than them! I had steak n eggs, the steak was cold and chewy. My hubby got pulled pork with poached eggs which shoddy! Pork benny so dry and tasteless!
They indicated local farm support and care of quality of food on website, however, I didn’t see it on our food. Probably won’t coming back again!

This is a very nice nook on W 6^th. I ordered the Flatbread but it was too crunchy and rich for my liking. I was expecting something softer. I couldn’t even cut it with a knife. But, my friends dish was fabulous! The meat with the potatoes and eggs… yum! Clearly I ordered the wrong thing.
I was dissapointed that there was no sweet option besides bread butter and jam.
So…I gotta give 3 stars.