The Best Thing I Ate All Week: A Seafood Tower With a Surprisingly Reasonable Price-Tag

“I can’t stop thinking about that tower,” says my husband. He hasn’t become an architecture buff overnight; no, he’s obsessing over a double-decker seafood platter. From three days ago.

I really can’t blame him. The crown jewel of the Seaside Provisions (in the lobby of the Seaside Hotel on the Lonsdale Quay) menu has been haunting my dreams too, since we took a SeaBus through the dark of night to check out the new LoLo spot. The whole menu is seafood-focused (surpriiiise) and does a solid job of not getting too fussy with the star ingredients—burrata is simply accented with white anchovy and scallion oil; expertly grilled squid is dotted with tahini and chili oil—but it’s the tower that really steals the show. 

Yeah, a $90 seafood tower isn’t going to ever be an everyday affair for most of us, but as a shared experience over a few glasses of wine (we’ll bring a few friends next time to share the bill and help us polish off that smoked salmon), this one’s practically a steal. The conserva alone—cans of smoked octopus from Portugal and sardines from Spain, nestled into the ice next to some house-made potato chips—would run you close to $40 at Como, and then there’s the fresh Fanny Bay oysters, the citrus-y ceviche, the fluffy crab coquettes that round out the feast.

Everything was ultra-fresh and somehow perfectly unfussy (you’ll find a duo of cheeky white-bread lobster rolls in the mix here) but it’s not just the West Coast-fresh flavours that has my financial-advisor spouse’s mind reeling: it’s the value. “How are they making any money?”

Better hop the SeaBus and try and deduce this mystery for yourself, bite by bite. 

Seaside Provisions
125 Victory Ship Way, North Vancouver
seasideprovisions.com