VanFoodies.com

(Editor’s note: This is Lisa’s debut post on VanFoodies.com. Enjoy!)

To the followers of VanFoodies, I am a new contributor to the blog. Hope you enjoy my future posts!

It was a sunny day, a day where I burnt my arm and worsened my Tom’s (shoes)  tan by sitting at a tiny sandwich shop at the corner of Pender and Homer. The interior is stuffy almost on hot days, but that doesn’t stop customers from piling into the shop.

The inside of the shop is old. Tables and chairs are fairly dated, maybe picked up from garage sales or vintage stores, glass jugs sitting at the counter with cucumber or lemon water, random ancient books in the corners gathering dust. As soon as you walk in, you look up at their menu, which consists of several chalk boards of chicken scratch handwriting of their different sandwiches, teas, cheese plate, etc. If you look to the side wall, there’s some peeling paint which may possibly explode moths out the wall any second. Beware.

This is one of my friends' sandwiches, the baked brie and pear.

There’s a charm to the place, like an old vintage store. So guess what, of course this place is run by hipsters. As defined by Urban Dictionary, a hipster is “one who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one uses the term “cool”; a Hipster would instead say “deck.”) The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat.”

In case you don't know what a hipster looks like.

Jokes aside, they were fairly nice to me. So it’s okay, as long as they aren’t stupid. Or else we would have a real situation.

The place is sometimes notorious for its awful and slow service, but I feel like it has improved since the last two times I visited. The service was fairly fast for how busy the shop was at lunch. The employees were apologetic for not cleaning the tables, not a big deal.

I ordered my usual, which was the prosciutto baguette which includes edam, balsamic vinegar, tomatoes, romaine, and some other things. My friends had the baked brie and pear, which had almost the same fillings including prosciutto. The baguettes are soft enough to bite into, loaded with prosciutto, and each ingredient tasted incredibly fresh. My friends’ sandwiches were a little on the salty side because of the brie, but it was paired well with the pear (hahaha, I’m so hilarious, no?). It’s a quality sandwich, one that I would come back for time after time, despite the lineup or the heat.

My delicious prosciutto sandwich!

The price for a sandwich is around $7-10, that is without a drink. They sell Fentiman’s soda, Boylan, and San Pellegrino if I remember correctly, and a long list of teas. They had a black currant drink before (very good, a little on the sweet side), not sure if they still have it.

Would I recommend coming to this place? Yes, but if you can’t stand vintage stores or hipsters…you best stay away. They might judge you if you bring in your Louis Vuitton hobo bag or your skull covered Christian Audigier shirt.

Happy eating!

Finch’s Tea & Coffee House
353 W Pender St, Vancouver
(604) 899-4040
www.finchteahouse.com