Dining - A Feast For The Senses

Vancouver is a restaurant town. To the west, there’s the Fraser Valley, the most fertile agricultural land in Canada. To the east, the ocean, and the source of fresh seafood. Add in mountains to the north, the best climate in Canada and an outdoor lifestyle, and Vancouver is a powerful lure for entrepreneurial restaurateurs and talented chefs. Pit creative, dedicated chefs against one another and the result is distinctive, innovative, high-quality cuisine.

And Vancouverites eat it up. Here, food critics appear to have more influence than political writers, and residents flock to culinary events: the best sampled at the annual Feast of Fields (which begins with a drive out to the bucolic Fraser Valley) and the Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards (even though they are held on a weekday afternoon during business hours).

If variety is the spice of life, it also flavours the Vancouver restaurant scene, as evidenced in the individuality of local chefs, the number of independent restaurants and the area’s diverse ethnic cultures. The majority of Vancouverites have European origins but those of Asian descent are not far behind. The city’s Chinese, Japanese and South Asian communities are so well established as to be mainstream, and the cuisines, along with comparative newcomers Thai, Korean and Vietnamese, are as noteworthy for their excellence as their ethnicity. Mark Bittman of the New York Times has commented that the Vancouver “Asian food scene is so good and so vast as to have few rivals in North America,” but he also recommends local European restaurants for “the freshness of the local ingredients.”

As the cultures mingle, so do the cuisines. Vancouver food writer and chef Stephen Wong defines the emerging West Coast style as a blending of Asian flavours and influences with western sensibilities and Canadian growers. He points out that now-standard fresh, live products and ingredients such as rockfish and lingcod were Asian first, and that western restaurants now have sushi bars.

Ultimately Vancouver restaurants are a product of their location in the West: a cosmopolitan, multicultural city blessed with a beautiful setting, abundant natural resources, an attractive lifestyle and a gentle climate. Our restaurants are great because people want to live here.