Fine Dining: A brief history

By Jamie Maw

THE SANDS AND SHOALS of the city’s dining landscape change daily, and over the past 40 years the aggregate of that change has transformed the way we eat today. It’s a landscape of many colours and textures that immediately speaks to new migrants arriving here to extol the virtues of their native cuisines. Some, perhaps homesick or spying a business opportunity, open restaurants to serve their countrymen. Lucky us.

More slowly, the influences of more than 150 mother cultures made their way into our culinary DNA. Today, Asian influences are commonplace on virtually all western menus (even those in chain restaurants) and, if the craze for izakaya is to be believed, the opposite is true as well.

There have been other factors at work: economics (our once-low dollar proved attractive to culinary tourists) and real estate values that dictate who goes where. Politics certainly raised its ugly head more than once. One of the most important factors in Vancouver’s entire dining history was the repeal of our nanny state drinking laws just a few years ago. Its effect was to even the landscape between hotels, pubs and restaurants. Now, like grown-ups everywhere else, we can order a glass of wine at a restaurant bar without “intention to eat,” and we can also stand, as is the custom elsewhere, to propose a toast.

But the most transformative change of all? It took at least 40 years—the entire history of this magazine—for our local gastronomy to come to reflect exactly where we live, to believe in local ingredients, local design and local chefs. Those transformations in turn now inform our collaborative dining culture. Along the way there have been many signal moments, events that marked evolutionary stages in the growth of our culinary culture. Here are the most important 10:

1967
Former Vancouver Sun theatre critic and bon viveur James Barber hijacks a Hotel Georgia menu. He would take it across Canada, ordering from it (with some confidence) in hotel dining rooms across the nation. He succeeds everywhere but Québec. Our Canadian cuisine, it seems, is defined by imperious headwaiters with unfathomable Austrian accents, imported ingredients and gloppy saucing. The Great Canadian Identity Crisis is now fully engaged with what we eat. Or don’t—surely, many ask, we’re not just defined by Nanaimo bars and the Yukon Breakfast at the Tomahawk. Barber himself would engage the persona of The Urban Peasant, reporting on flavoursome “ethnic” restaurants, then sensually translating those flavours in a panoply of cookbooks and his long-running CBC cooking show.

1970-73
Larry Killam’s almost single-handed redevelopment of Gastown extols the innocence of Bootlegger jeans and free (or at least heavily discounted) love. Boomer backpackers, fresh from rappelling across Europe, demand steak frites and escargots, and find them in The French Connection—Chez Joel, la crêperie, Le Coq au Vin, and La Brochette. Chez Victor defines weekend cool, with omelettes elevated by crème fraîche, fresh herbs (who knew?) and gauzy Gauloise smoke. Kafana Bosna, a slightly dangerous repository along East Hastings, offers meaty Bosnian dishes, meatier wines and the city’s definitive baklava.

1979
Vancouver Playhouse board member (and gourmand) John Levine initiates the Vancouver Playhouse Wine Festival at Hycroft. Just one winery—Robert Mondavi—is represented; 1,000 people attend. By 1987, the festival would become international in its scope and is now one of the largest and most respected wine conviviums in the world. The festival’s influence on our dining culture would be equally telling; companion dinners in Vancouver restaurants paired specific wines to meal courses carefully selected by city chefs.

1981
Vancouver’s coffee culture morphs, from 7-Up-signed greasy spoons to stylish downtown coffee bars: Ciao on Denman, L’espresso on Seymour, Mocha on Broadway. La Chef et Sa Femme, a charming Kitsilano restaurant, introduces quality tables d’hote with egalitarian $12, $17 and $24 versions—Vancouver’s first tasting menus to plumb local ingredients. Also groundbreaking: the chef and his wife would soon close and move to Granville Island to open The Stock Market, steadfastly refusing franchising opportunities while allowing amateur cooks to cheat nightly.

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