Vancouver House Restaurant Review: Find Crepes and Cider at Ça Marche

Just up the street from Autostrada is Ça Marche, the ode to Brittany from Maxime Bettili (Au Comptoir) that comes in the form of buckwheat crepes paired with cider. When people ask me whether Vancouver is a “world-class city,” my new response will be to ask them if their city has a Breton crepes-and-cider house. Like Au Comptoir, it nails that Gallic je ne sais quois perfectly, save for the banks of halogen lights by the windows, which illuminate the charmingly designed spot like it’s being used in a Hallmark movie called Love, Brittany.

Still, it’s a wonderfully esoteric concept and while there are a few outliers—there’s a single beer on tap and buckwheat blini are available if you order caviar—if you’re here, you’re having crepes and cider, and what’s wrong with that? The saucisse ($19) mixes pork and beef sausage with bacon, pea shoots, gruyere and pepper relish and, unlike most of the other crepes, it’s folded over like a burrito. It arrives unaccompanied on a beautiful ceramic plate, and it’s homey and enjoyable (even considering that adding heat to pea shoots is not my fave idea). The jambon cru ($24) is the more traditional layout, with a nicely cooked egg in the middle of the crepe and the ends folded over. It comes with prosciutto, burrata, arugula and splash of basil-infused olive oil—it’s very Instagrammable, especially given how bright the place is. It’s another homey dish, although a few notches up the elegance scale. Dessert? More (super tasty) crepes. The cider list is relatively compact and requires you to think of cider more like wine and less like beer (at least in terms of how much it will cost you), which is fine, because the 500 ml of Salt Spring Wild Dry Cider was a perfect pairing with the food.

When I visited they were just doing dinner, which is a shame because—apologies to all of Brittany—to the North American palate, crepes work best as breakfast food. They have just opened for lunch, which is great, and hopefully they can get some of that eggs-for-dinner marketing money because there’s nothing wrong with crepes at dinner, but as much as I’m proud that we have this sort of spot, I do wonder about the crepes-and-only-crepes theme in regards to long-term viability—whereas Autostrada eases right into the let’s-go-there-twice-a-month zone, right now, Ça Marche seems more like once-a-year territory.

READ MORE: Reviews of Vancouver House’s Autostrada and Linh Café