Restaurant Awards 2024, Editors’ Picks: Best Special Occasion Restaurant

For the 2024 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards, we introduced a very special new selection: Editors’ Picks, which highlight the rooms in the city that serve a specific purpose, in addition to having great food and service. 

Editors’ Pick: The Best Special Occasion Restaurant

Kissa Tanto—not quite Japanese, not quite Italian—doesn’t fit neatly into our other restaurant award categories, so it’s sometimes (tragically!) left out of the Restaurant Awards festivities, despite its undeniable excellence. (The confit albacore tuna, smoked potato and tobiko on bruschetta? The Dungeness crab charcoal udon with Calabrian chili butter? Get out of here.) And so it seems more than appropriate for this unique new award to go to a unique restaurant—a place that is dark, dreamy, seductively lost in time and unlike anywhere else in town. Slip upstairs into one of the intimate, rose-leather booths around a mahogany table and order something “tender to the tooth,” and you’ll see. Whatever your excuse for visiting—celebrating a birthday, an anniversary, a job promotion, a Thursday—it’s going to be a special one.

263 E Pender St.
kissatanto.com

Find more of the best Vancouver restaurants on our list of 2024 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Award winners.