When Alex Chen shops for his hot new restaurant, Boulevard, in the Downtown area of Vancouver, there’s one place he goes back to again and again: Granville Island. The public market there is a riot of colours. Everything looks good enough to eat right off the shelf – the fish included. I can’t think of a London equivalent. It’s like Brixton market might be if it were run by Michelin-starred chefs.
“I’ve been shopping here for 25 years now,” Chen says when we meet there. “It’s where everyone comes for seafood, vegetables, charcuterie, cheeses – all the good stuff. It’s got an amazing energy.”
First stop is Seafood City, where a huge bounty of local catches is laid out, including Dungeness crab, several varieties of salmon and even some black spiky balls that turn out to be sea urchin. “They call it the foie gras of the sea,” says Seafood City’s Ray Ogura from behind the counter. “It tastes super-rich.” The west coast variety of urchin is not poisonous – unlike in the tropics, as Ogura discovered to his cost.
“When I was on honeymoon in Tahiti I stepped on one. It hurt so much. This guy told me to pee on it. Did it work? No, but it made him laugh! To this day I still have urchin dye in my foot from where the point broke off.”
Next up is the Oyama Sausage Company. “It’s a fifth-generation charcuterie, still using the traditional methods,” says Chen. “They’ve recently introduced a ticket-queuing system, since it was so popular people would get into fights over who was up next.”
Jerome, the manager, greets Chen with a warm handshake and a plate of different meats to try. “We buy from small farmers,” says Jerome, who moved here from France 20 years ago, “and always try to find the different tastes – we have one who gives hazelnut and walnut shells to his pigs, so the meat gets a nutty quality. We use mostly old recipes from France, Italy, Spain and England, but we update them just a little bit, to give them a little less salt and fat.”
Also, his forefathers probably didn’t make charcuterie from elk and bison. Both are delicious.
Just across the aisle is the South China Seas Trading Company, a concrete example of the influence of east Asia on Vancouver. Chen shows me some matsutake mushrooms: “These are the truffles of Japan. They are very expensive over there, so much so that you often get an individual matsutake presented in a special gift box. These ones are local and in season right now. We are blessed with such an abundance of mushrooms here: chanterelles, porcini, lobster mushrooms. It’s great in the fall before it gets really wet.”
Another delicacy here is sawa wasabi – grown in water, rather than soil, and considered far superior in taste to the green stuff you usually get with your sushi. “Sawa wasabi is sweet, and only a little spicy,” says Chen. “A professor from the University of British Columbia is growing it now. In Japan they use a grater on it that’s made of shark skin rather than metal – you grate it straight on to the sushi, because in 15 minutes it starts to lose its flavour.”
And just how great the sawa wasabi is I’m about to find out, as Chen bids me join him for lunch in his new restaurant …
For a tour of Vancouver restaurants, including Alex Chen’s Boulevard, click here.
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