Category: Locals

The Edible Valley Podcast

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The Edible ValleyI get an electric charge when I’m listening to the radio and someone mentions something I know and love. It’s usually something related to mass media, but sometimes it’s more of a localized thing like a Vancouver restaurant I’ve eaten at or a local artist that’s getting big. The closer to home the topic is, the more I’m ‘gonna get excited.

So when I learned that there was a food podcast being beamed out of the Comox Valley by two local boys, focused on what was growing and being eaten right here, right now… I got BBQ duck excited! Read More

The Nest Bistro (Nanaimo, BC)

Shawn 1 Comment

The Nest BistroCrystal and I spent almost twenty minutes prowling the middle of freaking nowhere Nanaimo looking for The Nest Bistro, a highly recommended chef-owned joint which we had made dinner reservations for. We’d already passed a Phillipino mother smoking and breastfeeding in her doorway, a drunken soon-to-be domestic call two doors down and an elderly man with no shirt and one shoe chasing a cat back and forth across the road. It felt, magically, like we were back in our old neighbourhood in East Van – At first glance kind of ghetto, but the Tibetan prayer flags over everyone’s door made it okay. Read More

Ten BC Beers You Have to Try This Summer!

Shawn 5 Comments

BC BeersSummer. Beer.

No two words have ever been so flawlessly in simpatico. One is the perfect complement to the other, it’s twin and companion. Without one, the other is incomplete. There is nothing like sun, surf and a beer that has been freshly plucked from a slightly sand-crusted cooler’s cold, slushy recesses. Big sunglasses and good tunes naturally accompany such moments and bikini parties are sure to spontaneously occur. It’s science. Read More

Feasting On The Pacific Rim

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Pacific Rim1We’re rounding a bend on the Pacific Rim Highway doing sixty, the windows are half down and the sun is a full-blown supernova. No slow tourists getting in the way and no logging trucks are threatening to dust us off the highway’s notoriously thin ’n bendy lanes. All of this primal beauty is ours! Massive old-growth trees, sedimentary rock cliffs carved full of faces by ancient tectonic stress and erosion, ice-cold lakes. The ipod migrating back and forth on the dash just keyed-up Bran Van 3000’s Drinking In LA and my wife and I nod in unison. This is the life. Read More

Beijing House (Campbell River, BC)

Shawn 3 Comments

Beijing1My wife and I have spent much of our twelve years together moving from place to place. As nomads, who frequently spend little actual time together (due to me being a cook and her being a normal person, or “normie” as us cooks call ‘em) our most cherished moments are those weekly rituals designed to bring families together. Things like shopping, dog-walking, Netflicks binging, and dining. Of special importance are the evenings we dedicate to “eating out”. We jump in the car, speed off and spend a couple hours eating at “our place”.

At every way-station we have called home, “our place” has been a Chinese restaurant. If you’ve read my love letter to My Chinatown you probably know that the breakthrough food moment of my life was eating Chinese food with Crystal soon after we met. In Toronto we had the House of Gourmet, in Van. we had the (now sadly defunct) Wonton House, and in Campbell River we now spend countless evenings fighting chopstick duels for the last dumpling at Beijing House. Read More