DINNER WITH… pairs interesting Vancouverites with top notch restaurants. We want to showcase the minds and menus of some of our favourite people and establishments. We’ll pick their brains, while they devour their dinner, and hopefully YOU will come away inspired, enlightened and hungry…

Welcome back to Dinner With…I’ve been loving the weather in the city and thought I should take another one of our fabulous editors out to dinner to enjoy it so I had…

DINNER WITH… ERIN SHAW!

Erin is our editor of the The Pop-In, and you may already know her face from Shaw TV, as she is on The Express…covering feel good stories about Vancouver. Sound familiar?

I fell in love with her instantly when she made a halibut pun (“I might go for the halibut..just for the halibut!”) and her red hair and saucy personality reminded me of Christina Hendricks.

We sat down for a delightful dinner at Sandbar on Granville Island, and I was excited to have another date that liked to share…but first CHECK OUT THE VIEW:

Not too shabby eh?

The Sandbar has some excellent cocktails. This is the Cucumber Margarita and it’s as great as it sounds. Also recommend the Bert’s Wicked Lemonade (vodka soco and lemon) and the Pacifico (gin and pinapple).

Our wonderful chef started us off with seared sea scallops topped with mushrooms, sprouts and prawns!

We decided to share our appies. Erin picked the Fish Tacos and I chose the Wok Squid…both were almost a meal on their own…good thing we were hungry! Oh! I also tried two oysters from their fresh menu – a Kusshi, and a Royal Miyagi both were awesome.



Erin is leaving us (*sad face*) to go traveling for 3 months in southeast asia (*jealous face*) so we talked about travel and food and our lives. Then I got down to business and asked her the Dinner With…3 Questions.

Favourite Foods?: burrata (it’s a cheese, which I remember from VanMag’s 101 To Eat Before You Die!), grilled cheese sandwiches (best from Burgoo), cilantro, salt and pepper shrimp, “my grandma’s bread”, hard boiled eggs (“I have one in my purse right now!”), mac and cheese (but not everyday).

Favourite Vancouver Restaurants?: Grub, Salads De Fruits, Candia Taverna (“a greek restaurant in Point Grey, where I grew up. You can get my favourite thing…table wine!”), Nicli Antica Pizzeria in Gastown,  Re-Up BBQ


Our entree’s arrived, two fish-dishes from the FRESH menu. Erin did end up chosing the Halibut and I got the Arctic Char (both Oceanwise!) – both came was rice and veg, the halibut with a citrus butter sauce and the char with a lemon herb butter sauce. Both delicious, of course.

Over dessert Erin decided on her answer to the last question, which she had one answer for right away but pondered for a while until the second finally came to her.

If you could have dinner with ANYONE, who would it be…? “My granny, she passed away a few years ago…I’d have dinner with her…” OR “Pierre Trudeau, he’d be so entertaining!”


We finished off our desserts (White Chocolate Cheesecake w/ Raspberry Coulis – and Sunburnt Lemon Pie ALSO with Raspberry Coulis) and watched the sun set over English Bay (romantic, right?)…

Thanks once again go to The Sandbar for filling us to the point of bursting with great great food!
Stay tuned for the next installment in our Dinner With… series, set at another one of Vancouver’s best restaurants with another one of Vancouver’s best humans.