So what do you do when you have but one evening to dine in Vancouver, mecca of Pacific seafood, smug capital of Canada’s longest growing season and ground-breaking mile one of the local food movement (thanks to Vancouver writers Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon’s superb book, The 100 Mile Diet)? I put that question to the Barbara-Jo of Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks bookstores.
“Bishop’s,” she responded immediately.
She could have recommended trendier, pricier places, but the food is superb, she assured, and the 4th-Avenue West restaurant hit on its locavore theme many suppers before it was fashionable.
During my visit here, with my book, Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms, I had my own question for media - who’s your farmer? West-coast loco-vores, who presumably gobble up locally grown food produced by someone, answered my question with blank stares. My point being, we have doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, even personal trainers for gad sake. Yet, arguably, the really important people in our lives, the people who feed us, remain largely nameless and anonymous.
Not so with John Bishop, who proudly hails from farming stock. Some 15 years ago, the restaurateur struck up a relationship with organic farmers Naty and Gary King, who, in turn, introduced John to a seemingly secret society of local suppliers.
Shortly after we arrived at his restaurant, begging for the one table available, John introduced himself with a celebratory offering: two oysters, then later an apple cut in spiraling slices. He had heard about the Vancouver launch of my book earlier that evening. Nice!
I ordered a BC halibut and it arrived, spring-ocean sweet, in a gewurztraiminer butter sauce studded with tiny shiitake mushrooms and clinging to a seaweed tuft of spinach. My date for the night, writer John (Hemingway) Vigna, ordered the local duck. The food was as Barbara-Jo promised: superb.
Then John Bishop recommended my next meal: spotted prawns, unique to the BC and Alaska coastline, were coming into season. He suggested I pick up a pound or two at The Long Line Seafood stall at the Granville Island Public Market. Peel back the spotted shell, he said, sauté them in a bit of butter or olive oil, a splash of white wine.
As Hemingway and I drank back a spicy floral Okanogan Gewürztraminer from the Red Rooster Winery, we marveled at the close-knit food chain in Vancouver- cookbook stores supporting local chefs supporting local winemakers, farmers and fishers. It made me think of something Prince Edward Island oyster farmer Johnny Flynn had told to me when I was researching the first chapter of my book: “I get Darwin,” he said, “but I believe it’s the community minded sorts who are the fittest to survive.”
The next day, as I polished off a plate of the wild mild prawns, I decided to let this notion of connection guide my eating tour of Canada.
I wasn’t worried about going hungry at my next stops: Edmonton and Calgary. But my destination after that — Pincher Creek, two hours south of Calgary and in the middle of nowhere as far as foodies are concerned — might be a leaner story. And then there was Lethbridge after that.
What restos would Calgary foodies recommend there? The thought of encountering blank stares made me suddenly very, very hungry.
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