Vancouver began life as a tavern. Gastown, the historic district next to modern Downtown, was built around the saloon opened in 1867 by Yorkshire seaman “Gassy” Jack Deighton – the perfect place, therefore, to begin a culinary tour.
Vancouver, you see, is now challenging Toronto and Montreal as the true gastronomic capital of Canada; and, in the same way as London has, it is using its multicultural heritage to turn its cuisine into something unique and worth travelling for. Its innovative chefs are more passionate than any about the farm-to-plate (or ocean-to-plate) movement, and make full use of an abundance of independently and organically grown local produce, and of the bounties of the Pacific Ocean.
We begin in the Salt Tasting Room on Blood Alley, named after the butcher shops that used to line the street. There’s a long bar, banquette seating, a huge basement, and a buzzy crowd of young people in interesting hats. The idea here is to build your own tasting plate from the blackboard menu of cheeses, meats and condiments, and the bar staff will pair each with a glass of excellent British Columbian wine (or choose your own).
The owner, Sêan Heather, is a friendly, bearded Irishman who has been called the “King of Gastown”: he also runs the Irish Heather gastropub, the Shebeen Whiskey House and the Salty Tongue cafe. Heather seems to know every detail about where his food comes from. For instance, there’s the blue Juliette cheese from Salt Spring Island, served with honey from Similkameen Valley: “It’s like a commune,” he says. “They live off the grid, not even fax machines. This guy grows apricots just to guide the bees back to the honey. He doesn’t care about the apricots, so I beg him to let me pick them.”
Just around the corner is L’Abattoir, housed in a large building where Heather previously ran a pub. This is serious food, brilliantly executed: snails and crispy chicken skin; grilled squid stuffed with pork and herbs with mint and cucumber; elk pâté; breast of duck that comes looking like a plate of sushi with skin seared black. It’s huge, lively and packed to the rafters with contented diners.
A cut above
Over the next few days, back in the Downtown area, we go in search of great fish. It’s not hard to find. For a casual meal, try the Royal Dinette, which just opened in August. In choosing the name of his new restaurant, chef David Gunawan chose “dinette” to suggest accessible food and decor, and “royal” to show that the dishes were a cut above. He is fanatical about sourcing the very best sustainable ingredients from local farmers and fishermen, and changes the menu frequently according to what’s in season.
“I want food to be accessible,” Gunawan says, “to influence how we think about our lives and the choices we make, all based on being aware of the environment. I have a vision: we want to be the change.”
Gunawan is so passionate about seafood that he has an octopus tattooed all the way up his arm. Currently on the menu is ling cod with grilled octopus, chanterelles, grapes and caramelised buttermilk. Pasta is made fresh each day and includes squid ink rigatoni with albacore tuna and white anchovy.
For more fine dining, Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar, run by chef Alex Chen, has a seafood tower that betters anything I have had in Paris: there’s Sawmill Bay oysters, Reed Island mussels escabeche, Dungeness Crab Louie, wild stripe shrimp ceviche and albacore tuna tataki; all sustainably caught local produce, with lemon foams, spicy sauces and grated sawa wasabi to give it all a little extra kick.
The Boulevard opened in the summer of last year. Chen says: “When the owner said to me: ‘Close your eyes and tell me what you see,’ I told him that we’re on the west coast with an abundance of seafood and I wanted to be part of that. We are classically French trained, but with added west coast flair and an Asian influence. We’re not trying to be too fancy, we’re keeping things simple; just using good food with classic flavours but brought into the modern era.”
Ancora, encore
An even more extraordinary experience awaits the following evening. Ancora has a lot to live up to: this wonderful waterfront space with views of Granville Island from floor-to-ceiling windows was once home to the famous seafood restaurant C, birthplace of Rob Clark’s Ocean Wise initiative. But although Ancora has only been open since August, Peruvian chef Ricardo Valverde, who previously worked at top seafood restaurant the Blue Water Cafe, is already proving more than equal to the challenge.
The Michelin Guide does not cover Canada – yet. If it did, Ancora, like London’s Peruvian-with-a-twist Lima, would certainly earn a star or two. The scallop, with pork belly and peas, was the best I have ever tasted: lightly seared on the outside, tender but “meaty” inside. There’s tuna tartare with quail egg and crispy nori; oysters with a terrific consommé-type sauce; and a lobster risotto where the flesh is, unusually, perfectly cooked so it’s still tender and rich.
The wine must have been very good, too, because by the time it came to dessert, we collapsed into helpless giggles when the waitress offered us “alpha whores”. These are, in fact, “alfajores”, a traditional Peruvian cookie. But Ancora is that kind of place: a fine-dining establishment with extraordinary cooking, where you don’t feel you have to stand on ceremony.
There are loads more wonderful Vancouver restaurants. Outside the Downtown area, for instance, we experienced a terrific modern twist on First Nations cooking at Salmon n’ Bannock, while AnnaLena’s Asian-fusion cuisine has stormed to the top of the TripAdvisor charts in just half a year.
You’ll find your own special place, when you visit. But do it soon, and get them while they’re hot – or perhaps I should say, in deference to the many excellent sushi restaurants, cool.
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