The Best Thing I Ate All Week: Macadamia Nut Banana Pancakes at BLVD Bistro

Brunching is difficult at the best of times, but it just got a whole lot easier.

The other day I was on a quest for a new brunch spot, having grown tired of my go-to location with its no-fuss hearty breakfast. Now, I know brunch elicits mixed feelings. I had a co-worker who swore that it was a terrible idea and the boyfriend (who has an aversion to eggs that makes brunching in general quite difficult) agreed, although not quite so vociferously.

Enter BLVD Bistro: a busy spot in a quiet area just off North Vancouver’s Grand Boulevard and well away from the hustle and bustle of LoLo. It popped up in a Google search on Friday night and one item in particular immediately jumped off the menu. Further Googling revealed that the Macadamia Nut Banana Pancakes on the menu were a game changer.

So the next morning when three hot-off-the-grill pancakes came in a neat stack studded with macadamia nuts and banana all dusted with a fine layer of powdered sugar, toasted coconut ribbons and drizzled with coconut cream syrup, it was like heaven in a bite. Unfortunately, it’s not one of those meals you can savour slowly. It is, however, one of those shamefully-trace-your-finger-around-the-rim-of-the-plate-when-you’re-through kind of meals.

As an eggs-bennyaficionado, ordering a stack of pancakes was a new experience for me. I like toorder off a menu what I can’t make for myself. I can whip up pancakes in fiveseconds flat but I can’t make my own poached eggs worth a dime (although Istill vow to learn one day). However, the fluffy buttermilk pancakes on BLVD’smenu were beckoning, and they’ve been lingering on the back of my mind ever since.

Spoiler alert: Grand Boulevard may be a quiet area, but the Bistro isn’t on a Saturday morning. Evidently I wasn’t the only one waiting to dig into what promised to be an amazing stack of pancakes, but they’re definitely worth the line.

Macadamia Nut Banana Pancakes, $15 at BLVD Bistro (636 Queensbury Ave., North Vancouver)

More from our “Best Thing I Ate All Week” series:

The “Orange” at Billy Button Dessert BarA

Buttermilk Fried Chicken at Nightingale

Kir Royale Jell-O Shots at Key Party