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Fine Dining — Page 2
1986
In one of the most important transitional years of our
nascent dining culture, provincial Expo pavilion chefs
are forced to represent their local cuisines. It gets
competitive quickly: the Saskatchewan Pavilion boasts
all things Saskatoonberry while the B.C. Pavilion responds
with many, many riffs on salmon. Almost unwittingly,
Vancouver chefs take a deeper look at what’s growing
locally. But it takes pioneers such as Welshman John
Bishop to begin defining our regional cuisine through
the prism of the local ingredients that drive it. Expo
de-mobbs and gas pressure returns to downtown Vancouver
restaurants.
1994
At the International Wine and Spirits Competition in
London, the Mission Hill 1992 Chardonnay wins the prestigious
Avery Cup for best Chardonnay in the world. The judges,
unsure where the Okanagan Valley is, and suspicious
of a hoax, demand a re-taste. John Simes’s first
vintage wins again, sure evidence that Anthony von Mandl’s
investment and the mid-’80s pull-out of nasty
vines is bearing fruit. Early adopters boost B.C. wines
from cult following to fashionable: Blue Mountain Pinot
Noir leads the charge.
1995
The Rise of the Celebrity Chef. Rob Feenie, a restless
savant, opens West Broadway’s Lumière and
revolutionizes how we look at dinner. Combining Asian
influences, local market ingredients, French technique
and relentless energy, he serves up tasting menus that
light up city foodinistas and international gastronauts.
Feenie would then aggressively expand his brand through
a Food Network Canada TV show, cookbooks, cooking demos
around the world and non-stop press attention, soon
replacing Umberto Menghi as the city’s culinary
media darling.
1997
The Small Plates revolution begins at Chef Gord Martin’s
Bin 941, Tapastree and more. The origins are found in
Asian sharing platters; casual, last-minute, commitment-fearful
Vancouver diners; and the urge to graze the appy portion
of menus. It’s bait-and-switch writ large as savvy
restaurateurs find a new, and more egalitarian, way
to take our money. But it happened here first: interviews
with chefs in other North American cities reveal that
they have never heard of this tapas hybrid.
2006
Sustainability and lots of it! Green (or Hi-Res, Low
Imprint) menus abound, with pioneers such as Harry Kambolis,
C’s Robert Clark, and Aurora’s Jeff Van
Geest following the lead of Sooke Harbour House’s
Sinclair Philip. But it’s first-among-equals John
Bishop who will win this magazine’s first Green
Award at the 18th annual Restaurant Awards in 2007,
which remain unique in North America. The Chefs’
Table Society of B.C. gains heft with its regional bestseller,
Vancouver Cooks; the collaborative champions sustainable
ingredients with a small fuel footprint, and sponsors
the city’s inaugural Spot Prawn Festival, a product
formerly shipped to Japan while we settled for the tasteless—and
environmentally hazardous—Thai version.
2007
Vancouver’s largest single opening wave, of more
than 100 fine dining restaurants, sweeps the pre-Olympics
city, from the $200,000 Bistro Bistrot to the $8-million
Shore Club. It’s born of a strong economy, but
is also a coming-of-age story: diversity and profusion
abound on the plate; close your eyes, taste the fare,
and know that you could only be dining in Vancouver,
and Vancouver alone.
THE ARUGULA
PARADOX: An Irreverent Parallel History of Dining
During the culinary Dark Ages—that time now universally
known as the Pre-Arugula Epoch to food anthropologists
and paleontologists—certain sinister dilemmas
faced early food adventurers, foragers and risk-takers,
dilemmas that have stirred controversy among local food
experts.
One such dilemma: Whether it took more courage to eat
the first oyster or the first dessert. Food anthropologists
now pretty much agree that the oyster was the more daunting—it
was typically harder to open and required specialized
hardware such as a rock and a hard place.
A rump group of contrarians, however, forcefully maintains
that the mega-dessert known as Death by Chocolate (1978)
was, by right of its very name alone, probably equally
frightening, especially if you’d just eaten a
lot of oysters.
But now much larger issues confront food anthropologists.
Debate rages in university food departments, although
locally, both UBC and Simon Fraser University food professors
have recently lost their faculties, mainly due to government
cutbacks or unfortunate local wine pairings.
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