sanafir
I went to Sanafir on Granville tonight with a group of girlfriends. While I’ll highly recommend the food there, I’d suggest you bring a big wallet and a small appetite. I’m pretty certain this restaurant caters to the pre-club-going, young and beautiful set and not the stuff your face and then go home and fall on the couch in your lulu’s to watch a movie set, so I understand (and was expecting) smaller portion sizes and the prices seemed reasonable on their on-line menu.
I arrived a bit late so I’m not sure if we were given a features menu or not, but sticking to their tapas style menu was more appealing anyways. The tapas items are presented in an interesting way – listed are eight different tapas groupings: calamari, tuna, prawn, lamb, arctic char, pork, chicken or vegetarian. For $14 (which is completely reasonable) you receive three tapas from your group selection. For instance, if you choose chicken, you get Moroccan Chicken Tajine, Indonesian Chicken Satays and Kashmir Tandoor Chicken.
If you don’t want all three dishes from the same grouping, another option is to pick three items from the entire tapas menu for $19 – also reasonable.
The last option is to share a chef’s platter which isn’t so much a platter, but rather a chef’s choice of tapas. Four of us chose to do this, for $35 each, which is where I found quantity of food : cost to be a little off. However, the chef’s choices really were amazing. From what I remember, we had hummus, soft-shell crab with a lemon garlic aioli, mushroom risotto, beef with Chinese yard beans and ahi tuna.
Definitely a great, if small, meal – which left lots of room for wine and homemade après dinner limoncillo, oh yum.
I will definitely go to Sanafir again, but in retrospect I think a better option (for me) would be to order a couple of the tapas group selections, which would be $7 less than my portion of the share platter, and seemed like more food. Again, the food was fabulous, so mentioning the smaller sizes and the price of the chef’s choice platters is not so much a critique as an observation — and fair warning that you may have to hit the drive-thru on the way home.
