Headwaters

I'd walked past many times, and seen all the tourists eating breakfast and lunch, but I'd had never eaten there.  So when I first heard that the restaurant in The Heathman Hotel was closing, I thought, "oh, that's (maybe) interesting".  But when I heard Vitaly Paley was opening the new restaurant in The Heathman Hotel, called Headwaters, that definitely got my attention.  So I made a reservation for Christmas Eve dinner.

They feature seafood heavily, so a good place to start was with oysters.  They had many varieties available that night, and we asked our server for a selection and got:  Goose Point, Kusshi, and Stony Point.  They were good, but I'm still trying to learn to taste the differences between the varieties. 

They had some interesting seafood bite options on the Sea Bar menu, so we ordered the mussel and the uni shot with tomato water and salt.  The uni was interesting, it started with tomato and then creamy uni and the end was just salty, a bit too salty, I think.

The albacore and green bean salad was not exactly what I was expecting, but I still enjoyed it.  Our server said it was one of her favorite items on the menu.  I had pictured larger chunks of tuna with smaller pieces of green beans, but this albacore was pretty finely shredded, more like what you would get out of a can.  All topped with crispy bread crumbs.

To round out the meal, a couple sides:  roasted brussels sprouts and fries.  The brussel sprouts were very nicely roasted and the fries were a nice counterpoint to the salad. 

For dessert, I ordered the gingerbread babka with rum ice cream and pear.  It was really interesting.  Each on their own was a bit much, the babka was very sweet and the rum ice cream was very rummy, but together they worked very well to make a sweet, rummy, creamy and yummy dessert.  Although not a traditional babka, I enjoyed it.

***Headwaters Closed in 2020***