Recent Ramblings

One good thing about all the travel I do back and forth to Vancouver is that it gives me the opportunity to try new places to eat, and new shops to rummage through.

One new-ish restaurant I’ve been to a couple of times now in Vancouver is called Hapa Izakaya on Robson Street. (Hapa Izakaya, 1479 Robson St. Tel: 604-689-4272)
It’s modeled after a typical Japanese-style bar, and all the servers gustily shout greetings as you walk in the door. A friend who went there for the first time thought there was something wrong as they shouted, then realized this was friendly, not antagonistic.

You slip off your shoes, which go into little bunks at the base of the tables, and hop up onto platforms or belly up to the bar. It’s not a place for quiet conversation, and the décor is black industrial chic, definitely a hip and happening place. This isn’t a sushi restaurant, although there are a few raw fish-style offerings. This is more typical Japanese bar food, washed down with lots of beer or sake. My favorite snack is a little bowl filled with edame, soybeans boiled in the pod, then seasoned with a little salt or soy sauce. Most of the fun comes in squeezing the bright green soybeans out of their pods and into your mouth. Another good dish was a bowl of cold, chewy cockles. Doesn’t sound that appetizing, but after massaging a few with my teeth I was hooked on the texture and the healthy level of spicy hot sauce in which they were marinated. My favorite dish of the night was the lightly-pickled mackerel. One whole fillet, carved into tiny slices, and lightly broiled with a blowtorch right at your table. The mackerel is rich and oily, and one fillet goes a long way. Two of us ate and drank well for about 40 dollars in total, and the staff all cheerfully shouted at us again as we left. This comes under my category of Cheap and Cheerful, and will be featured on my Pacific Palate show within the next couple of months. To read Tim Pawsey’s review of Hapa, click here.

Late last week I headed over to Saltspring Island for a quick tour of a salmon farm. This is a pilot project that is examining the feasibility of raising salmon in closed bags of ocean water, instead of in the typical net cage system, the one that has spawned so much controversy over pollution under the cages, transfer of sea lice to wild salmon, and escapement of farmed fish into the wild environment. It’s a difficult topic to wade through, and farmed salmon protesters have done an excellent job of distorting or exaggerating the situation to the point that what they say is often taken as gospel. The farmed salmon industry, on the other hand, has done a poor job of fighting back with their own point of view, and their own facts and figures. I’m a consumer of wild salmon, I prefer the taste and the texture, but I feel salmon aquaculture does have a place in today’s society and economy. The companies spend a lot more time preventing escapement and pollution than most people know, and the idea that this one company has spent millions of dollars on Saltspring to look at alternative methods of farming shows a commitment to the environment and will be a story I’ll be telling next year. It was a bitterly cold and windy afternoon on Saltspring, and the bags have been emptied of this year’s ‘herd’. Some Atlantic salmon remained in the net cages, and we could see them leaping and slicing through the air. So far the company has discovered that it CAN raise salmon in a bag to maturity with low mortality rates, but the cost of doing so is 37 percent higher than salmon raised in the traditional net cage system. I’d love to hear what you think about the farmed salmon controversy. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and submit a comment. That’s all for now, watch for much, much more over the next few days of craziness I’m about to experience at Cornucopia in Whistler.

To see photos for this entry click here.