The new issue of Vancouver Magazine is about to hit news stands and within its back pages is a feature I wrote called “The Tipping Point”. In it, I talk about the new difficulties facing fine dining restaurants and how restaurant service has evolved from starched snobbery on the high end to a style that is more of an honest reflection of Vancouver’s love affair with all things casual. To wit: out of all the fine dining restaurants to open in Vancouver in the last five years, roughly half have already either closed or been forced to re-tool and re-brand. It was a tricky story to nail down because the landscape kept changing during the editing process. Originally, the focus was to be seen through the prism of my stage at L’Abattoir, which provided me with a front row seat for examining the extent to which service had changed, but with the closing of Lumiere and the opening of Hawksworth and Ensemble, that focus had to change. I’m very grateful to my editor, Rebecca Philps, for her help in shepherding it along. The delay in putting it to bed (this was supposed to be published six months ago) made for a far better and well-rounded story, and proof that the ground is not just moving under the trade’s clogs, but the feet of those who write about it as well. You can read the whole thing here.