The brothers from Vancouver watch a good, cheap meal on YouTube

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If you’re looking for delicious and cheap food in Vancouver, the Zsillei brothers’ YouTube channel is for you.

It’s called “Reelin’ in the Beers” and has grown from barely 500 subscribers a few months ago to 5,500 today.

Inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” and the TV travel series “Departures,” Owen and Jeremy Zsillei began reviewing Vancouver bars like Lamplighter and Metropole after they reopened with restrictions following the pandemic, as well as takeout reviews at Gringo Taco, one of their favorite restaurants.

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Jeremy, now 31, works in IT and moved to Vancouver seven years ago to study at BCIT. Owen, 25, followed soon after and works as a chef in a brewpub.

They don’t make any money from their project, but they’ve been enjoying it since they started their YouTube company four years ago.

“It was such a weird feeling during the COVID lockdown, we thought, ‘We have to document this,'” Jeremy said. “We had no idea how long it would last, so we went to Metropole, our favorite bar at the time.”

“I think we were just bored,” Owen added. “Originally we always wanted to make a travel video, but we thought, ‘Let’s just start making videos here and hone our craft a little bit.'”

In fact, her YouTube offerings include a Japan series about a bar crawl in Tokyo’s Shibuya district; about whether there’s a difference between cheap and expensive ramen; about how to survive on supermarket food for 24 hours; and about what to do in Tokyo at night until the trains start running again at 6 a.m.

At home, they tried Zac-Zac Japanese Curry House, Italian Day on the Drive, Vietnamese restaurants, dim sum restaurants and Burnaby’s Crystal Mall, always keeping prices between $5 and $10.

“No McDonald’s meal and no Costco hot dogs,” Jeremy said. “A lot of those lists have a $3 slice of pizza. I hate that crap. We’ve gone to the trouble of finding meals that you can get in Vancouver for under $10.”

Check out Sea House on Kingsway, Grab N Go in Yaletown, Bon’s Off Broadway in Nanaimo – just the tip of the iceberg, as Jeremy puts it.

The boys grew up in Cranbrook and are just as Canadian as Fubar or the Trailer Park Boys.

When they moved from their hometown to Vancouver and discovered food options other than Boston Pizza, they were overjoyed.

Their mini-documentaries are peppered with F-bombs—if a bite is particularly tasty, for example, it’s not just delicious, it’s “fucking delicious”—and radiate how much fun they’re having. Because they feature copyrighted music, they’re not allowed to monetize their videos, so it’s a labor of love.

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They were asked if they would like to become influencers, but declined because they feared they would be portrayed as decoys rather than humorous critics.

“The rent is so high, it’s so difficult to live here. If you can get really delicious, cheap food for only $6.50, everyone in the city can enjoy that,” Jeremy said.

They seem to get along amazingly well, and given that there is a five-year age difference, you might think that there was no competition in their childhood. But you would be wrong.

“We had arguments as children,” Owen said. “Our friendship began when I moved here.”

They sat at a corner table in Yaser’s Cafe on Sunset Street in Burnaby, just a few minutes’ drive from their home in East Van. Yaser Ezzat opened the cafe in 1994, and prices aren’t much higher than they were 30 years ago.

Every day there is a new special offer for $6.50 in a small, always busy restaurant that doesn’t even have the name of the restaurant on the door, but which nevertheless appears in the new board game Burnaby-opoly.

“I’ve been there five times since our review,” said Owen as he dug into the dish of the day, a hearty plate of pasta with garlic bread.

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When you first meet Ezzat, you will probably be greeted with a hug or a handshake, both accompanied by a broad smile.

He has been running his small restaurant six days a week for four decades now and now serves the fourth generation of his customers, the great-grandchildren of his original guests.

When he noticed the Zsillei brothers’ footage, this was not the first time his cafe was reviewed on YouTube.

One reviewer shot a video of Yaser in Bengali, a few more in Mandarin, plus a handful of other reviews.

“Jeremy and Owen just showed up, I didn’t know who they were,” Ezzat said. “They were taking pictures of their food, I assumed it was for their Facebook page.”

“A friend of mine sent me the YouTube link he got from a friend in Boston. It was well done, the best I’ve ever seen.”

The brothers also plan to make more travel documentaries and in the meantime discover more lesser-known culinary wonders in and around Vancouver. Their goal is to make one every month.

And they like the idea of ​​a short documentary about the explosive growth of psilocybin shops in Vancouver.

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“I think Owen summed it up best,” Jeremy said. “Our channel is like if our friends and family came to Vancouver, what would we show them? Things we like.”

“We just enjoy finding cool places.”

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