Lan’s Restaurant, 1481 West Broadway, Vancouver

Today, VanRamblings débuts a new category on our site, “Cheap Eats,” a guide to those restaurants in town which offer fine cuisine at an affordable price (which is to say, under $10 per person, for a quite extraordinary meal). In this first post, we’ll highlight Lan’s Restaurant.
In Vancouver, we are fortunate to be gifted with a kaleidoscopic smorgasbord of restaurants, with cuisines ranging from Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and south Asian fare of every description, to middle Eastern and every other category of ethnic cuisine, to the tried-and-true heart attacks specials offered by the greasy diners of our youth (something we have difficulty resisting from time to time).

Although Lan’s offers traditional Vietnamese cuisine — ranging from Lemon Grass Boneless Chicken Steak to King Crab in Curry Sauce, and Quail in Lemon Grass Sauce, not to mention a panoply of appetizer, hot pot, noodle and rice dishes — for those on a budget, the real savings at Lan’s occurs when the diner sets aside the main menu for the Special Combinations sheet that comes tucked inside the menu booklet that is delivered to the table.
For $7.50, diners are offered a 5-course meal of succulent Vietnamese fare.
Those $7.50 special combination dinners include …

• Combination A: corn chowder or sweet and sour soup, a Vietnamese salad, pork brochette, Vietnamese roll dip, and Vietnamese steam rolls
• Combination C: the soup of the day, Vietnamese salad, curry vegetable, lemon grass chicken steak, and steamed rice or Vietnamese chow mein
• Combination H, a veggie combo: soup of the day, Vietnamese salad, vegetable with oyster, vegetarian roll dip, and vegetarian chow mein

Lan’s Restaurant simply cannot be beat. The restaurant’s atmosphere is homey, nicely appointed and welcoming, the tea is warming, the service is friendly and the food always first rate. For $7.50 (plus tax and tip), Lan’s Restaurant is one Cheap Eats restaurant you should check out the next time your pocketbook is lean, and hunger strikes. You’ll be glad you did.
Lan’s Restaurant, 1481 West Broadway, just east of Granville Street.
Open 11 a.m. – 10 p.m., Tuesday thru Saturday. Phone: 604-738-2338.