Vancouver

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Just look at the brightly-colored Vancouver Aquabus and tell me you wouldn’t like a toy-size version for your bathtub. I mean, it’s so cool. Saturday I hopped on one at Hornby Street to go over to the Public Market on Granville Island (which really isn’t an island, but you know how those Canadians are) and instead of getting off where I was supposed to, I kept riding—down False Creek (which also isn’t a creek; see above) to Yaletown and all the way to Plaza of Nations and then back. And I was still reluctant to get off. In fact, I think if you had a bottle of champagne and some goodies from the Public Market—like maybe a pint of the wild salmon chowder from the Stock Market, a yummy soup emporium—you couldn’t have a more pleasant outing than tooting up and down False Creek aboard a little Aquabus all day.

But then you’d miss all the fun at the Public Market, which just absolutely screams Pacific Northwest at you, particularly on a cool, misty, foggy morning when all the Vancouverite moms are tooling around Granville in bright Gore-Tex hoodies, pushing their children—costumed in brilliant red or yellow galoshes—up and down the Public Market aisles in strollers.

I’m telling you, I’ve never seen a town so in love with dressing up their kids. They’re just incredibly stylish in their bumble bee toques and pink rain jackets and strawberry-print pants. It’s enough to make you want to have children just so you can have fun accessorizing them.

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Sunday brunch at Floata

The chicken feet at Floata Seafood restaurant in Vancouver.

The chicken feet at Floata Seafood restaurant in Vancouver.

Sunday morning I walked around Vancouver’s Chinatown with Stephen Wong, an exuberant habitué of the area. Born in Hong Kong, Stephen moved to Vancouver in 1978 and has either owned or worked for a host of Vancouver restaurants and co-authored a number of cookbooks on Chinese cooking. (His business card hints at the many faces of Stephen Wong. Below his name, written in Mandarin, it says Cookbook Author, Food Consultant, Restaurant Concept Designer, and Project Development Manager.)

The last time I was here, maybe ten years ago, Wong and I had a memorable Sunday brunch at a cavernous restaurant smack in the middle of Chinatown, called Floata Seafood, and it’s here that I’ve suggested we dine again. But Wong isn’t crazy about the idea. “Always very crowded on Sundays,” he says. He suggests we try a place on Fraser Street that has excellent Cantonese- and Northern-style dim sum like har gow (shrimp dumplings) and lo mai gai (sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves).

Sounds good. But I’ve been thinking of the dim sum at Floata for days now. Besides, it’s just a couple of blocks from the Dr. Sun Yat Classical Chinese Garden where I want to visit this afternoon. Stephen says, Okay, we’ll go to Floata, but I can tell he’s not happy about it.

When we get there, I can see why. The place is a zoo. (Floata’s happy claim to fame is that, seating over 1,000 people, they’re the largest Chinese restaurant in Canada.) At first we’re told there’s a 30 minute wait but after Stephen has a private conversation with one of the managers, we are suddenly escorted to a table in the back of what looks like a convention hall. Much of the room is filled with large round banquet tables, the type that seat eight to twelve people. Lots of families. Lots of maj jong grannies. It’s like a large wedding reception with kids running around and people sitting up on an elevated dais in the front of the room and loud music, laughter, pandemonium. And then there’s me, a gwai-lo, and Stephen, sitting in the back. So here’s what happens when you get seated at Floata: the receptionist puts a number on your table (we were 49), and then a young woman promptly brings you tea (without asking), and then you wait for the little old ladies wheeling trolley carts to come by your table with the dim sum.

Except if you’re a party of two and you’re sitting in the back of the room, you’re lucky if the carts ever make it back that way. And if they do, they’re often times low on food (there’s a trick here to ordering; you have to check the carts to see how many servings of, say, BBQ pork bun, they have left because if it’s only one or two, it’s usually old and that silky quality of really good dim sum has been replaced with kind of a nasty paste flavor).

Now, Stephen Wong knows just about everybody in Chinatown (if not Vancouver) and, as I said, he’s an accomplished restaurateur and cookbook author, so at most restaurants around here, we’d be well taken care of. Which is probably why he suggested we go to some little place in his neighborhood (but I wouldn’t listen). But here at Floata, in a dining room that looks like a football field, where maybe a thousand people are waiting to be fed by dozens of servers spinning their trolleys through narrow lanes—well, it’s just not happening. Still, we eventually get some siu mai, which is very salty, and pork congee, which is very salty, and chiu chow, which is…well, you get the idea. The best dish: chicken feet. Salty, but tasty.

Walking to the Dr. Sun Yat garden after lunch, I apologize. “You were right,” I tell Stephen.

“Sometimes a famous old restaurant is just a famous old restaurant,” he says.

Amen to that.

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Across Lions Gate Bridge

Lions Gate Bridge and the hills of West Vancouver.

Lions Gate Bridge and the hills of West Vancouver.

“Vancouver is a very young city. It’s only about 130 years old,” says Manfred Scholermann in his Hamburg accent. “So the difference between old money and new money in Vancouver is about 30 years. To a European, this is very funny.”

(To his point, in 1907, Rudyard Kipling wrote, in a letter to his family, that “Vancouver is an aged city, for only a few days previous to my arrival the Vancouver Baby—i.e. the first child born in Vancouver—had been married.”)

Manfred and I are inching our way through early evening traffic headed towards narrow Lions Gate Bridge. One thing I’ve noticed about Vancouver is that the traffic is as bad as in L.A. When I mention this to Manfred, he says, “Actually, Vancouver has come up with a really great way of handling congestion—they don’t do anything about it. And that forces people to find alternatives to driving.”

Well, okay. There’s a certain pretzel logic in that, I suppose. Lions Gate Bridge itself has a rather interesting history. In 1932, the Guinness family used a bit of their beer money to buy 4,000 acres of West Vancouver mountainside through a syndicate called British Pacific Properties. The idea was to develop the land and turn it into the tony section of Vancouver. The only problem was that the only way to get there from downtown Vancouver was by ferry.

So in order to get people from downtown Vancouver to West Vancouver, a bridge was built, beginning in 1937, at a cost of $5,873,837.17 (Canadian). And West Vancouver was developed (and it is still the most fashionable part of town). And then in 1955, the Guinness family sold the bridge to the province of British Columbia for…(wait for it)…$5,959,060. So I guess they got their cake and got to eat it too.

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Busy, Busy Coal Harbour

Canada Place, with its sail roof, ringed with cruise ships in Coal Harbour.

Canada Place, with its sail roof, ringed with cruise ships in Coal Harbour.

Vancouver is a water nymph floating on her back in a pea green pond. That’s the conclusion I came to after spending much of yesterday walking along the waterfront harbor, ending up at Canada Place, home of all the luxury cruise ships heading seaward as well the main press center for the Olympics.

Take enough escalators up and down Canada Place and sooner or later you’ll find a bar where you can sip a glass of B.C. wine, like a Gehringer Brothers Pinot Blanc or Mission Hill Chardonnay, while watching all the action in busy Coal Harbour, all of which reminds me of a scene from one of those Richard Scarry books like Busy, Busy Town. There is no Mr. Frumble having a very bad day or Sgt. Murphy chasing Bananas Gorilla, but the harbor is, nonetheless, busy and loud with ridiculous noises: the basso profundo blasts of the cruise ships pulling in or out of the pier; the twap-twap-twap of helicopters gently alighting at the heli-port; the gutteral buzz of seaplanes—one after the other—plopping down in the bay like hungry pelicans.

A scene from Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Town

A scene from Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Town

Ferries glide by, sailboats flap their sails, and huge party boats with names like Pride of Vancouver and Queen of Diamonds slowly cruise the waterfront, their decks spilling over with bundled up crowds drinking wine and cocktails. Even from high atop a hotel along the harbor, you can hear their mingled laughter, catch a fragment of a song spilling from deck speakers (it’s that Canadian goddess, Sarah McLachlan, I’m sure!), and see the tuxedo-shirted waitresses in bow ties offering up canapés to the guests.

There are floating gas stations (Chevron, Esso, Petro Canada) and a big barge with a fire engine red crane swinging buckets of river rocks to extend the shoreline just that much further out into the water. Container freighters chug past Stanley Park and the Sea Bus hurries towards North Vancouver with evening commuters. It’s mesmerizing and so you understand why I sit there, taking it all in, ordering another glass of wine, until the sun has set behind me, sky and water gone inky black, leaving me like Jay Gatsby, sitting on a pier staring at the red and green dock light across the sound.

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Hiking with Manfred the Magician

A bridge across the Capilano River. Photo by David Lansing.

A bridge across the Capilano River. Photo by David Lansing.

Manfred Scholermann is famished. So am I. We have been hiking all morning in the temperate rain forests of Capilano River Park, following the reverse course of doomed coho and Chinook salmon making their way from the Burrard Inlet to the Capilano River Hatchery, and now we are headed for lunch, in our sweat-soaked shirts and muddy boots, to a stylish café in West Vancouver. The restaurant is filled with well-heeled businessmen and elegantly dressed women.

I would like to take off my damp, dirty baseball cap—I really would—but the constant drip of water from the towering cedars and firs of the Capilano rain forest, which is just twenty minutes from downtown Vancouver, has plastered my thin hair to my scalp like wallpaper. Better to leave the hat on, I think. Besides, Manfred is a former chef, a wine connoisseur, and an excellent raconteur and doesn’t seem the least concerned to be sitting in this tony restaurant with muddy legs protruding from soaked khaki shorts, so why should I.

On our rather strenuous hike, Manfred waxed poetically about the sea, the river, the forest, and all creatures large and small that lived in this forest fairyland. He picked wild salmonberries from the bushes and munched on the young green sprouts of hemlock branches as warm moisture, dew, condensation—whatever you want to call it (it wasn’t exactly raining, though it felt like it)—fell like spit from the tree canopy towering hundreds of feet overhead. It seemed as if every sentence out of Manfred’s mouth contained the word rain or river or sea or water. Though I was soaked through and through, it made me thirsty. It also made me crave salty, fleshy things from the ocean. So much so that I pondered lurching into the fast-flowing Capilano and stalking a salmon like one of the forest’s bears currently hibernating (I hope).

It was at this point, I suppose, while standing on a slick boulder on the banks of the river, that I reached into my pocket for a dry tissue to blow my nose and, forgetting that I’d stuffed some bills in there as well, watched as four twenties, held together with a paper clip, dropped into the swirling water and quickly disappeared downstream.

I cursed. Manfred consoled me by offering to buy lunch. Which is why we are now at this warm little café drinking Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc and slurping down salty fanny bay oysters as quickly as our waitress can bring them. And so the afternoon goes along pleasantly enough, with me and Manfred sloshing down Cloudy Bay like pirates and wolfing down oysters like sea otters. Manfred is telling me a humorous story about his days as a chef at the Banff Springs Chateau when I interrupt him with a howl. I have just bitten into something extremely hard in the middle of my fanny bay. I spit it out of my mouth and hold it in the palm of my hand: a perfect little pearl. A gift from the sea.

“That’s very good luck,” Manfred says.

I wipe the pearl with my napkin and slip it into my pants pocket. We finish our lunch. And as we are running down the sidewalk, the rain having picked up while we lunched, I spot a hundred-dollar Canadian note floating in the gutter. Almost an exact conversion of the four twenties I’d lost this morning.

“I think this city is good for you,” Manfred says, slapping me on the back as I climb into his car.

I think he may be right.

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