[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: September 15, 2014]
Recovered from the sea voyage, we spent our first morning in Vancouver in Stanley Park, watching the wandering wildlife, tripping over ducks and geese, then lunched on local hot-smoked salmon in the park restaurant.
That night was family dinner, but the next day we dug into the restaurant scene.
I'd visited Vancouver several times over the years to see my migrant family, but I'd never used the Skyrail, a subway in the sky which scoops you from the remote suburbs to downtown. It's fun in sparkling fall sunshine. On foot we toured Gastown and Chinatown, stepping gingerly around the depressingly large numbers of junkies in various states of unconsciousness on the streets.
My diary isn't clear on this, but it looks like lunch came in a revolving restaurant, probably Top of Vancouver, and there was chowder, and shrimp-scallops brochettes, and a shared lobster. In the evening, a restaurant meal I'd planned in advance at West, whence news of David Hawksworth's cooking had spread across the New York food discussion boards.
West turned out to be a neat little restaurant on a suburban shopping strip--it reminded me a little of the discreet but ambitious restaurant's in Barcelona's Eixample district. Walls of wine signalled the seriousness of the place. Dinner included:
Oysters, Okanagan Valley Bing cherry vinaigrette
Parfait of foie gras and chicken liver, apple jelly, brioche toast
Ham and foie gras terrine
Duck confit ravioli
Braised rabbit leg, cherry tomatoes, crisp pancetta, fennel, smoked tomato gnocchi
Braised lamb shank
What, no pudding? Probably not: not many sweet tooths around that particular dinner table. I know we drank gin and tonic (a family thing), but not throughout the meal.
The next day was sunny too, but we cooled off with a trip up Grouse Mountain. We saw the grizzly bears, and ate an amazing lunch at a tourist restaurant: a stack of Flinstone-like smoked beef ribs (some crab cakes too, for the faint hearted). Afternoon nap, then out with the boys for beers at the Elephant & Castle "pub," settled with a "Big Ben" burger.
The final day of our trip gave us a chance to pay belated tribute to Asian eating opportunities in an increasingly Asian city. We headed out to one of the huge Chinese shopping malls, the Yaohan Center, and after picking up a bunch of souvenirs, settled ourselves in the food court:
Beef "internal" with dried noodles
Deep fried quails
"Salty" fish
Steamed halibut
BBQ pork with rice
Cakes
I wasn't going to get certain members of the party back on the boat to Seattle, so we ended up taking a short--and equally bumpy--flight on a small prop plane down the coast, then a sleepless night flight back to New York.
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