92 Ways to Enjoy Summer in the City

                    

                                                                          Image: David Fierro               

  Express Yourself

 

Whatever you do during these precious months of warmth, make it loud and make it count. Here’s how.

Where to Shop

Where to Eat & Drink

What to Do

                    Where to Shop

 

                

                                                                        Image: Cristian Isidro

 

Go Somewhere New

 

A collection of our favourite new(ish) stores, all worthy of an afternoon’s diversion

 

    

                

 

Track Down the Hottest Summer Style Trends

 

You can find a wealth of on-trend summer staples in your favourite local shops. Shopgirl picks 25 stylish items fitting for the season: sunglasses, dresses, sandals, and swimwear for men and women

 

              

                                                                   Illustration: Lauren Tamaki

 

Take Tips from Local Shopping Pros

 

Meet Angela Krewnchuk, one-half of the brain trust behind a dishy Vancouver-based national retail blog

 

                   

                                                                            Image: Lucas Findlay

 

Venture down Alberni Street

 

Luxury is right around the corner

 

Looking for more ways to enjoy Summer in the City? Our picks for Where to Eat & Drink and What to Do

                Where to Eat & Drink

                

                                                                            Image: Kamil Bialous

 

Vancouver’s Best Patios

 

Five spots to sip, nibble, and bask

 

               

                                                                            Image: Corey Dawson

 

Hawker Food

 

We may not have the steamy, open-air food centres found in Singapore and Malaysia, but you can channel the heat via essential dishes from rooms across the city 

 

 

                 

                                                                      Illustration: Lauren Tamaki  

 

Wine Picks for Hawker Food

 

Mike Bernardo, Vij’s sommelier, picks three wines that complement the intense, spicy flavours of hawker food 

 

 

               

                                                                          Image: Corey Dawson

 

Picnic for Two

 

Park Heffelfinger and George Siu of Memphis Blues build the perfect summer basket for two 

 

 

               

                                                                         Image: Kamil Bialous

 

Poolside Cocktail Recipes

 

Three summer cocktails perfect for poolside entertaining from our Bartender of the Year, “H”, who mans the wood at Railtown’s newly opened Cuchillo 

 

 

           

                                                                            Image: Angela Fama

 

Earnest Ice Cream

 

Nothing beats a cold, sweet cone on a sweltering day. Just ask this dreamy duo 

Ben Ernst (a Washington native and food enthusiast) and Erica Bernardi (a culinary grad from Ontario’s George Brown University) of Earnest Ice Cream met in the back yard of the East Vancouver house Erica shared with Ben’s girlfriend (now wife). The two quickly discovered a mutual passion for local, sustainable food, and “what if” banter around starting an artisanal ice cream business (“Erica and I found each other at a time when we were both stalled in our careers,” says Ben. “We were asking ourselves, What do we really want to do?”) soon turned into reality when they realized no one in Vancouver had capitalized on the handmade ice cream craze already hitting Portland and Seattle. After spending the last two years peddling their melty treats (literally, using a custom bicycle cooler) at farmers markets and striking deals with gourmet grocery shops, the pair are set to open their first bricks-and-mortar shop at 24th and Fraser any day now.­­ -Ross Langill

 

 

              

                                                                            Image: John Sinal

 

Summer Rosés

 

Rosés are a year-round food friend, delivering red wine-like structure with the refreshment of a white. But there’s something about sipping pinks on a patio that’s definitively summer 

 

 

Looking for more ways to enjoy Summer in the City? Our picks for Where to Shop and What to Do

                         What to Do

                     

                                                                            Illustration: Lauren Tamaki  

 

Read a Good Book

 

Local writer Anakana Schofield’s first novel, the wise, warm Malarky, appeared on 16 best-of-the-year lists and won Amazon’s First Novel prize. Read it, then move on to her summer picks

 

The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon (Random House of Canada)
A remarkable portrait of Aristotle’s daughter Pythias, so vivid it would make your eyes water. This summer I want to take to an Adirondack chair with it and relive Ancient Greece in the midst of a Cortes Island blue sky and Grandma’s unripened tomatoes in pots beside me. 

Taxi! by Helen Potrebenko (Lazarapress.ca)
All Vancouverites should seek out one of the remaining 500 copies of this vital novel concerning the daily life of a woman cab driver circa 1975. The book opened up the city’s past in a way I could not discern from looking at its present.

Subject to Change by Renee Rodin (Talon Books)
A reflective documentation of an artistic, family, and activist life, this collection of encounters is humorous, sad, and uplifting and reflects that to which we all aspire: an honest life well lived, in which we are warmly loved.  

 

 

                    

                                                                            Illustration: Lauren Tamaki  

 

Play the Hits

 

Music video director Tony Pantages creates the perfect playlist for sultry summer nights

 

1) The Look by Metronomy
2) El Raton by Los Invasores
3) Get Lucky by Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams
4) Little Bird by Far East Movement
5) Miss You by The Rolling Stones
6) Love Interruption by Jack White
7) Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It by Stars
8) Israelites by Desmond Dekker
9) Anti Love Song by Betty Davis
10) Everybody Loves the Sunshine by Roy Ayers
11) Hercules by Aaron Neville
12) Ay by Arema Arega
13) Maker by Fink

 

 

                    

                                              Photograph: Yuichi Takasaka; Illustration: Lauren Tamaki

 

Go Star Gazing

 

The days are blessedly long, but the real magic happens on warm summer nights. Fall into the clear, starry sky 

 

 

                    

                                                                                Image: Kyle Pearce

 

Hit the Beach

 

A day at the beach doesn’t have to mean dodging errant volleyballs and sprawling suburbanites. Time it right and be master of the ocean 

 

Mark 10:21 a.m. on Sunday July 21 in your calendar-it’s the precise moment the tide will be at its lowest point during the months of July and August, which means you can wander out for miles along sandy flats into the middle of English Bay, close enough to those great hulking tankers that you can almost touch them. 

 

 

                    

                                                                                Image: Josh Brown

 

Catch a Ballgame

 

The sport of baseball affords many pleasures for head and heart. A Friday nooner at the Nat gifts all this, plus a two-foot-long hot dog and the thrill of a truant afternoon while all the other suckers are stuck back at work

 

George Carlin, in a famous routine about the differences between football and baseball, said, “Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.” All right! He also said about the aim of the players that in football one uses all kinds of military manoeuvres to invade the enemy’s zone, whereas in baseball one wants to get home, to be safe at home.

In this sense, you might say that baseball is a classic game. If you go to the most famous epic of all time, the Odyssey, you will find that the main desire of its hero Odysseus is to get home. Monsters and horny women try to stop him but nothing can make him stray from his intention to reach home, in his home park in Ithica.

Presiding at home, in the case of the Odyssey, is Penelope, who spends her days at the loom. Presiding at home in our own story of heroes is the catcher, the guy with the best view in the park. It is a cliché to say that the catcher has the whole game in front of him, the only defensive player who does. He it is who starts each play by signaling his desire to the pitcher. All the other players see the pitcher from behind or in their peripheral vision. The catcher it is who sets into play the challenges that will come to these other players. He’s the custodian of home and the foreman of the whole spread. 

George Bowering, The Diamond Alphabet: Baseball in Shorts. BookThug, 2011. Excerpted by permission of the publisher. 

 

Looking for more ways to enjoy Summer in the City? Our picks for Where to Shop and Where to Eat & Drink