Dear Gus Snack Bar is the newest darling of the Mount Pleasant food scene in Vancouver. All the details are meticulous and how can you not fall in love with their cute and fluffy rabbit mascot? Dear Gus bills itself as a small European wine and snack bar, and they’re not kidding when they say small. This spot is narrow and tiny without even a proper kitchen. It is perpetually busy, but definitely some of that is due to its size. I came by on a weekday around 6 pm and was able to snag one of the last bar seats. Their menu changes quite often, but check out my full Dear Gus Snack Bar review below to see what I got and what I thought!
Dear Gus Snack Bar – Food Menu
Since Dear Gus is a wine and snack bar, we had to try some wine. Our server gave us a couple recommendations and let us try some before we decided on our glasses. Side note, the wine glasses are so darling! The branding for this spot is just top notch. We went with two glasses of Riesling and the following dishes:
- cheese & charcuterie platter, olives, almonds, pickles, crackers ($48.00)
- mussels, nduja, saffron tomato broth, bread ($28.00)
- tagliatelle, morels, black garlic butter, asparagus, charcoal ($32.00)
- gus’s carrot cake, brown butter cream cheese, walnuts ($12.00)
Every table is given a small dish of popcorn which was super tasty! Refill are $1 per dish. We love ourselves a good charcuterie board so we got the platter with all the works. There was nice selection of cheese and meats which I never tried before. The charcuterie was nice. The cheese selection wasn’t my favourite and for $48, the portion size was quite small for 2 of the 3 cheeses. I wish there was a bit more variety for the accoutrements. Additionally the swapped out almonds for cashews which aren’t my favourite for nuts, but that’s a personal preference.
Moving on to some heartier dishes, we got the mussels. This was okay, the bread was divine and I could eat a whole plate of bread by itself. It was also the perfect sponge for the flavourful (albeit extremely salty) tomato broth. The mussels themselves were not bad, but we had four closed mussels and the dish itself was already quite small, so that was disappointing.
The pasta feature when we went was tagliatelle. The pasta had a nice bite to it, but I felt like the dish itself lacked any character. It was quite salty and I couldn’t really detect where the charcoal came into play.
To end the night we got their signature carrot cake. It was one of the highlights of the night for me. The cake was not too sweet and the carrot gel went well with the brown butter cream cheese.
Worth a Try?
For me, unfortunately no. The space is really cute and it’s very popular but overall it wasn’t for me. The highlights for me was the complimentary popcorn and the carrot cake. The service was good, since we were at the bar they did ask a few times how we found everything which was nice. They also constantly topped up my water which I appreciated. Due to the size of the restaurant and the lack of a proper kitchen the ventilation is pretty bad. My eyes were stinging a bit after dinner because of all the smoke and my clothes absolutely reeked after dinner. If you’re a huge wine person, this might be the spot for you, but I’d go elsewhere for food. For something similar I would definitely recommend Is That French in Gastown.
Dear Gus Snack Bar
Address: 2040 Quebec St, Vancouver, BC V5T 4J7
Website: https://www.deargus.com/
