So.Cial Butchery

So.Cial At Le Magasin is a new culinary venture in a 1911 Gastown heritage building that has filled most of the unused space in a mall. There is a restaurant dining room that I've peered into numerous times and deemed not for me. The old-world-hotelish feeling about the lushly upholstered chairs and the white tablecloths is too uncomfortable for my tastes, no matter how good their brunch menu looks. There is also an Oyster Bar downstairs that looks promising, and now, just freshly opened last week, is a Custom Butchershop and Deli. I went down there on opening day to see what a high-end butchershop in a neighbourhood with no food stores looks like.

Not surprisingly, considering the gorgeous space they're occupying, it looks good.

To get to the deli section, you actually need to come in off of Cordova Street (unless you want to peer in the windows of the dining room and oyster bar). From there you can't miss it, just follow the art deco red and black signage on Le Magasin's wood masthead and So.Cial's banners until it turns into a modern, distinctly west-coast butchershop, complete with a cedar tree set up in the middle of it surrounded by river rocks.

You can buy a selection of deli meats from the counter, and a few people were perusing the selection of sausages, terrines and house bacon, but mostly the lineup was for sandwiches and lunch fare. A BBQ outside was dishing up pulled pork sandwiches and a custom selection of fresh made sandwiches - from mortadella to pancetta - was available inside, along with some terrine lunches.

At first the service seemed kind of slow for a sandwich shop, but hey, it was their first day, you have to give them some slack. Then after a while it seemed excruciatingly slow. I don't wear a watch, but there was a long moment when no one was being helped at all, the counter people were just slicing meats and re-stocking supplies - ALL of the counter people - and there was a moment when 2 of the people behind me said, "oh forget it!" and left. I amused myself by trying to catch sight of one of the butchers' tattoos, then trying to imagine how she got it past the managers. I'm not sure what the actual object was, a person maybe, but it was meant to be bleeding, and red ink spilled down her arm in an inky approximation of rivulets. Peeking out from starched white smocks, in the most beautiful butchershop I've ever seen, it is quite close to the worst juxtaposition I've seen. Vegetarians would have been horrified.

They probably would have been horrified anyways, with my medium pancetta sandwich and small wild boar and apricot terrine. It was absolutely worth the wait. Well, maybe not that long of a wait, but I suspect they've gotten faster now and you can't begrudge a new restaurant being busier than they expected on their first day! The sandwich - a medium - was about as big a sandwich I have ever seen. I got everything on it as a courtesy to the frazzled counter staff and that included all sorts of veggies I was too hungry to note properly, and a kind of mayo-sundried tomato sauce with caraway seeds on the freshest softest focaccia bread I have ever tasted. I think next time I will get 2 sandwiches and use one for a pillow during my after lunch nap. The sandwich also came with their own homemade potato chips which were deliciously salty and tangy, but which I only ate 3 of because there was just too much food. I ended up giving half of the sandwich and all of the chips to my dad and the terrine I took home to have at home later with some wine.

Unwrapping the butcher paper later after work, I saw that the terrine was also enormous. All of this cost $13 and fed 3 people. I don't know if they were dishing out extra large portions because of the wait, but I would hate to see the large sandwich if half of the medium was filling. Anyways, the wild boar and apricot terrine was both salty and smoky and wonderfully smooth and delicately textured, like a meaty mousse. The whole apricots embedded in it were a nice measure, breaking up both texture and flavour. This dish came with 4 slices of white bread (again, the pillowy softness! how do they get bread this soft?!) gherkins and sundried tomatoes so that you could easily make a meal out of it.

So.Cial At Le Magasin
332 Water Street
(604) 669-4488