Rel-ish Bistro

I have eaten here when I’ve been in Nelson with family but I will not again. My close friend has been denied service as she has a disability and requires a service dog. Health code allows entry for service animals in restaurants, in fact it’s illegal to deny service to a disabled person and/​or their service animal. It’s just a discriminatory and disgusting. Please boycott.

I had the soup of the day — Seafood Chowder — and their Nelson Star Burger Week entry — The Gunpowder Gertie. All very good. How often does a burger come flambéd?!? Very nice touch.
Great lunch at a reasonable price.

Couldn’t agree more with a previous review about the staff being ‘inconvenienced’ to serve patrons. We were sat promptly and then forgotten. We had reviewed the menu in its entirety before we were finally offered a beverage. The three girls working were so engaged in conversation with one another at the bar they couldn’t be bothered with us. Service is 60%, food is 40% responsible for success in restaurants, hence why this place will be just another casualty in this highly competitive industry.

The crispy tofu and rice bowl is so good. They had other bowls, like shrimp and chicken, that I wanted to try too. The French onion soup was rich and sweet. They make good cocktails too!

Customer service here rocks just as much as the food. Our waitress was the best. We opted for salads (a wild mushroom and a roasted beet) for entrees. They were large enough to adequately fulfill our hunger, and the generous chunks of goat chèvre were the perfect touch of creaminess. Our cocktails were a nice blend of sweet: spirit ratio. Finally the GF chocolate cake (I still cannot believe this moist, fluffy cake was GF — DELICIOUS!) and the not GF lemon tart on shortbread crust.. . Neither disappointed. WONDERFUL!

My wife, daughter and son in law stopped by for light lunch. All the food was great. We recommend the squid and an order of yam fries. Service was attentive & pleasant. A delightful surprise.

Friendly staff, great service and good food. Definitely the place to go when you are in Nelson.

A higher-​end dining experience (Psst: in Nelson, that means washing the mud off your feet :) filled with creative, comforting, and — most importantly — filling food. This bistro strives to use local Kootenay ingredients. Good-​sized portions ranging from inspired interpretations on classic burgers to distinctively unique (and yummy) entrees are all up for order. Try the Aunt May burger: topped with apple butter and brie, it’s mighty tasty.
Downside: the portion sizes aren’t consistent — some of us received more of certain things than others on two different trips. Usually that would give me no reason to pause, but as a more upscale establishment, quality is key.

Read the menu carefully, as the words tend to blend together on the page. Tried one of their bowls thinking I was getting mostly vegetables. Underneath where it says «Bowls» it says «Served with rice.» And it was mostly rice. Disappointed.

My friend and I were visiting Nelson, and had lunch here one afternoon. We enjoyed it very much, we had a veggie burger, with a side of delicious quinoa. We thoroughly enjoyed it, and they were so nice to accommodate me, as I am vegan. Would definitely go back !!

Read, salivate, drive to Nelson, eat at Relish.
My son and I were so impressed with the intensity of all the flavours.
Great waitress and even though I vowed to skip dessert… I couldn’t resist.

Good, consistent food. Service is generally good, though odd at times. Awesome cocktails. Overall, worth it and one of the better places in town. Think of it as a killer burger joint with nice drinks and you won’t be disappointed.

Such an awesome place! Modern look and the open kitchen is a really cool concept. Highly recommend the goat cheese stuffed prawns! They are to die for. Great menu and so many choices for people with special diets. Will come back here again and again.

My friend and I stopped in for appetizers one evening before we went to the theatre. Service was good and the appies delicious. I would give it another try for the burgers. I could see where it could get loud as the space is small and sort of crowded but not unlike most of the other restaurants in Nelson. face it, space is at a premiuim in this town.

I really wanted to like this place — it has stylish décor and an eclectic, fine-​dining meets grandma’s house in Mayberry sort of menu. But after two lackluster dining experiences and one horrible experience, it is time to give up and review Relish for what is is: all style and no substance, with bizarre service to boot. I love food, and I am generally not very hard to please, but I will never, ever eat at Relish again.
My first time there was about a year ago and I had an unmemorable, overcooked burger that was more «meatloaf patty» than proper burger. The meat tasted strongly of onions and garlic, which I can only assume were added to cover up the taste of poor quality meat, which had an overworked sausage-​like texture. It is not difficult to make a good, juicy burger, so that should have clued me in to the lack of skill in the kitchen. To be fair, I have yet to have a truly good burger in Nelson, and for some strange reason most restaurants here tend toward meatloaf/​meatball/​sausage style burgers (Bogustown Pub is the single exception I have found so far — just straight-​up beef, and only slightly overcooked), but for $ 16 at a «real» restaurant like Relish, I expected a lot more. I expected a place where the kitchen staff would take some pride in sourcing and showcasing quality ingredients, rather than cheaping out and adding fillers to their hamburger patties.
My second experience was a few months ago. My brother was in town visiting and we could not get a reservation at All Seasons or Bibo, so I figured I would give Relish another try. Wow, this place gets very loud on a Saturday night. It was almost nightclub loud in there, and they were blasting horrible music. Not a good vibe when you just want to relax after skiing all day. I had an uninspired salmon dish, which I think may have been a special that night. I honestly could have cooked something better for myself at home and saved a whackload of money. On the other hand, my brother seemed to enjoy his fisherman’s pie. The service was extremely slow and extremely flaky. We were brought someone else’s appetizer and both started eating it before we realized that it wasn’t ours.
We then watched in horror as our waitress picked the plate up from our table and brought it directly to another table. She KNEW we had had our hands in it. Nasty! When we finally got the appetizer we ordered (poutine) it was not good. It was extremely dry — never a good quality in poutine. Again, poutine is a dish that is pretty difficult to screw up, even at a fast food restaurant, so the fact that it was sub-​par says a lot about relish.
I did not have a choice on my last trip to Relish. It was chosen by my dining companions. I thought it would be a safe bet to order the fisherman’s pie, since my brother had thoroughly enjoyed it. I was wrong. First of all, it was nothing like the dish that my brother received, which was bursting with large chunks of seafood and had a delicious-​looking crust on top. The dish I received was a flavourless milky broth with a few small pieces of mystery fish floating around in it and a slightly sour tang. A few bland white breadcrumbs were thrown on top and turned into a mushy paste as soon as I stuck my spoon in the dish. Once again, the service was also bad.
I left Relish vowing never to return (my friends were also unimpressed with the food and the service). Then, within about 15 minutes of leaving I became violently ill. I will spare you the details, but the fish was twice as bad on the way back up. I have not gotten food poisoning this bad in my entire life — I was out of commission for 2 days, and could only eat toast and applesauce for a week!
You suck, Relish!

Top 3 places to eat entire menu GREAT!

I happened upon this restaurant walking down Baker Street. Normally, I stick to Unilocal recommendations but Rel-​ish just opened in February and no one had taken the time to list it.
I visited Rel-​ish on a quiet Monday evening. It is a clean and modern room with very friendly staff. They have a limited but decent selection of (mostly) BC wines to choose from. The menu is modern American with a few twists thrown in. I had a roasted beet salad to start. Lots of beets on a sizeable bed of mixed greens served with a curry dressing. Simple and delicious. I also had the blackened sole (fish special of the day) served on baby bok choy and mashed potatoes with cooked pineapple on the side, all topped with roasted corn. It felt very Jamaican to me. The spice on the fish was spicy without being overbearing. One very small thing that I would have preferred was if the pineapple was cut into smaller pieces, or perhaps mixed into the corn to make a relish. The sweetness of the pineapple went very well with the spiciness of the fish but it seemed a little unnatural to eat it the way it was served. Like I said, a very small preference.
Overall, especially for a new restaurant in a town of many great places to eat, I think they have something to offer.