I took this video today of construction continuing apace at Judas Goat, the tiny tapas joint going in right beside Salt Tasting Room in Gastown’s soon-to-be-much spiffier Blood Alley. Look for it in January.

All Anticipated Openings

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L to R: Dale Mackay of Lumiere (silver); Rob Feenie of Cactus Club (gold): Pino Posteraro of Cioppino's (bronze)

“Comeback” might be a bit of a loaded word, but it fits to an arguable degree. After Rob Feenie left his eponymous Feenie’s restaurant and flagship Lumiere two years ago and landed as the Food Concept Architect for the Cactus Club chain, it could have easily been assumed that he had bought a one way ticket to the wilderness of the restaurant world. But last night, at the prestigious Vancouver Gold Medal Plates cooking competition, he bested nine of BC’s greatest chefs and reminded this town of his incredibly refined talent by taking gold. And he totally deserved it.

My friend and fellow judge, James Chatto, on how it all went down:

Last night, the Olympic city of Vancouver restated its intention to be regarded as Canada’s gastronomic capital with a dazzling sell-out fundraiser for Gold Medal Plates. The evening began with a VIP reception where lucky guests were treated to an array of Canada’s finest wines as chosen by GMP National Wine Advisor, David Lawrason, and Wine Access magazine. Last year’s gold-medal chef, Frank Pabst of Blue Water Café, provided a delectable accompaniment in the form of tiny pyramids of crab mousse topped with sustainable Canadian sturgeon caviar. Speeches were inspiring, pertinent and brief – then the crowd headed off for the first part of the evening, the chefs’ competition. The list of gustatory gladiators was the strongest ever gathered in this city, with every chef a potential winner, and standards were extraordinarily high. The final decisions were only reached after close to an hour of deliberation among the hard-working judges. Their reward was a sit-down celebration and some great music from Jim Cuddy and Stephen Page.

In the end, the bronze medal was awarded to former gold-medallist Pino Posteraro of Cioppino’s. He began by presenting an “amuse” – morsels of sweet, maple-marinated sable fish on a tangy jelly made from his chosen wine, a delectable Sauvignon Blanc-Semillon blend called Alibi from Black Hills Estate Winery in B.C.’s Okanagan valley. Then came a small bowl containing a perfectly textured raviolo filled with smoked sable fish and a dab of puréed potato. Beneath this was a bed of impeccably tender-firm green Umbrian lentils cooked in the broth that had poached the smoked fish, reinforced with some smoked olive oil. The sauce was a spot prawn cream subtly enhanced with traces of parmesan, lemon and Demerara sugar, a little of which had been turned into a snowy foam that capped the raviolo. All in all, a stunning affair.

The silver medal was awarded to Dale Mackay of Lumière. He presented a most elegant dish consisting of three components, with flavours that drew moans of pleasure from the judges. The principal element was a slice of a terrine en croute, its delicate frame of soft pastry shaped like an arched chancel window, but instead of stained glass Chef Mackay had layered several treatments of Sloping Hill Farm pork, using the gizzard, leg and belly, reinforced with foie gras and a topaz-coloured Okanagan quince jelly. Beside it, tiny turned radish, turnip, cornichon and poached quince had been lightly pickled – they looked like a handful of precious gems. On the right a rectangular strip of firm quince jelly was another sweet-tart condiment while a teaspoonful of pork jus completed the dish. Chef Mackay’s chosen wine, a tangy 2008 Tantalus Riesling from the Okanagan, was a luminous match.

The gold medal, not for the first time, was awarded to Rob Feenie of Cactus Club. He began his dish with a teaspoonful of sorbet made from parsnip, pear and pineapple, perfectly judged to introduce flavours in his chosen wine, a big, bright 2008 blend of Viognier, Roussanne and Marsanne from Road 13 in the Okanagan. Two principal elements on the plate that followed wowed the judges: first, a brick-shaped portion of layered Virginia Jacobs duck meat confited sous-vide for 24 hours to the peak of tenderness. Beside it, Chef Feenie posed a small boudin noir made of pressed chicken from Polderside Farms in Chiliwack, subtly enriched with foie gras. A dot of puréed fig was one garnish, matching another illusory moment in the wine; on top of everything lay a flavourful slice of flash-frozen truffle. More truffle was chopped up and mixed with a vinegar-based sauce, its acidity muted and mellow. The dish had its own thrilling and resonant harmonies and eventually emerged as a most worthy winner.

Congratulations to all the chefs who performed so well, and to the judges who had their work cut out determining a winner from such a talented field. Chef Feenie goes on to the Canadian Culinary Championship in Vancouver in November which is already shaping up to be the mother of all gastronomic confrontations.

It was a spectacular, very well-served evening. I didn’t get up from our table once so I have no idea how the mingling went. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t take many photographs and zero video (if you want to see how it went down last year, take a look here).

Competitor’s dishes arrived every ten minutes or so, so we had time enough to inspect, taste, and ruminate without feeling too rushed. I saved my marking for the very end this time, and tried to allow myself some pleasure with each plate. The order in which the courses arrived made sense according to the wine pairings: light whites and seafood first and then the red meats and bolder wines. In the end, it felt we’d buzzed through a well considered 10 course tasting menu. I was sated as such. The closest experience that I can compare it to would be last winter’s CTS Senza Frontiere dinner at Cioppino’s, where many of the exact same chefs were doing the cooking (video here). It was the sort of meal that one floats away from, immersed in a dimension of satisfaction that seldom makes itself available.

The after party upstairs in the Bayshore was a straight up hoot, too. I found myself in a small huddle of wine appreciators who’d somehow gotten hold of several bottles of Bordeaux from the 1960′s and 1970′s, and we went to town on them like children through Fanta at a birthday party. Big thanks to whoever paid that particular bill!

Next up for winner Rob Feenie will be the Canadian Culinary Championships. He will represent our region against the winning chefs from the other cities of Canada in three gruelling competitions in late November (more info here). If you’d like a refresher on the process, press play on last year’s video below…

A strange week this was in the local food media. All the critics seem to have taken it off, myself included, preferring to write about cookbooks rather than reviewing restaurants. And as far as my google reader is concerned, Alexandra Gill is AWOL at the Globe and Mail. I couldn’t find her column to save my life (here’s last week’s on Nor Boo to tide you over)…

But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other worthwhile reads in our national paper. I particularly enjoyed the one about Paris’ famed Tour L’Argent restaurant clearing out its ancient cellars:

Over the years, the chief sommelier had forgotten they were there. And when the four bottles of 1875 Armagnac Vieux were finally unearthed from the labyrinthine wine cellar this week, they were covered in a black fungus that looked like matted cat fur.

The landmark Tour d’Argent restaurant, which dates back to 1582, is cleaning out its 450,000-bottle wine cellar, considered one of the best in the world. It is putting 18,000 bottles up for auction in December, an event that has captured the imagination of French wine lovers.

The restaurant is selling mostly wine but also some very old spirits, like three bottles of a Clos du Griffier Cognac from 1788, the year before the French Revolution, as well as the ancient Armagnac, valued at €400-500 ($595-$743 U.S.) a bottle. The fuzzy fungus is nothing to worry about — it thrives on the fumes of such spirits and often grows on long-aged bottles.

Elsewhere, in this week’s Westender, I do another cover story, this time on Araxi’s cookbook and the Whistler restaurant’s awesome, extra especially very better good year.

In the North Shore News, Deana Lancaster talks to author and executive director emeritus of the Center for Urban Agriculture Michael Ableman, and Tim Pawsey drinks South African wine.

In the Vancouver Sun, Mia Stainsby pays Elements Urban Tapas Parlour a visit while up in Whistler and also test drives the Vancouver Cooks 2 cookbook.

In the Georgia Straight, Carolyn Ali writes up several cookbooks and Jurgen Gothe tastes his way through the portfolio of See Ya Later Ranch.

In the Vancouver Courier, Tim Pawsey also gets into the cookbook swing of things, penning paras on Araxi’s new cookbook as well as Vancouver Cooks 2 (thanks for the kind words, Tim).

All Anticipated Openings

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How many of BC's top chefs can you recognise? Put names to the faces at the bottom of this post.

The other night at the Dirty Apron cooking school, the Chefs’ Table Society hosted a launch party for their new cookbook, Vancouver Cooks 2. Several contributing chefs served up samples of their recipes from the book using the school’s many stations, while dozens of guests from the media and the restaurant world sipped on Mission Hill wines, R&B Sun God Wheat Ale, and bottles of Chambar’s signature brew…

The book – a long labour of collective love edited by Joan Cross, Jamie Maw, and myself with a lovely foreword by Vicki Gabereau – sees over 100 recipes for the home cook by nearly 70 of BC’s best chefs. It has been available at Barbara Jo’s Books To Cooks for the past few weeks, but now the distribution and sales start in earnest.

If you haven’t purchased a copy yet, please consider buying several. Not only do they make handsome editions to any coffee table or kitchen shelf, they’re also perfect gifts for Christmas. Those who purchase the book can be happy in the knowledge that all royalties go to the Chefs’ Table Scholarship and Bursary Fund, supporting and shepherding the next generation of Vancouver cooks.

As I said in my little speech that night, this book is an accomplishment our city’s restaurant community can really be proud of. To see chefs and restaurateurs from competing establishments come together for a selfless common purpose is a rare thing, a phenomenon that I think is exclusive to this province. It was an incredible experience being a part of this book’s production, one I won’t soon forget.

On behalf of my co-editors Jamie Maw and Joan Cross, I’d like to once again extend our many thanks to Tiffany Soper and Michelle Sproule (my wife) for their tireless wrangling and organisational prowess; to Sid Cross for his dozens of BC wine pairings (and behind-the-scenes guidance); to CTS president Pino Posteraro for his leadership and navigation; to Lucy Kenward and Chris LaBonte at Douglas & McIntyre for their forthrightness and always open minds; to photographers Shannon Mendes and John Sherlock for their appetite-accelerating artistry (just look at Stephane Istel’s pork belly on pg.136); and to all the many dozens of chefs, chefs de cuisine, pastry chefs, and sous chefs who instantly recognised what we were trying to accomplish with this book and took time from their busy lives to do something that would enrich our culinary community for the better. Thank you.

Who are the chefs depicted in the photo?

STANDING, Left to Right: Nico Schuerman (Chambar), Dave Robertson (Dirty Apron), Yuji Otsuka (Yuji’s), John Bishop (Bishop’s), Robert Clark (C, Nu, Raincity Grill), Mary Mackay (Terra Breads), Cameron Hock (Terra Breads), Angus An (Maenam, Gastropod Catering), Alessandra Quaglia (Provence), Julian Bond (PICA), Robert Belcham (Fuel, Campagnolo), Dino Renaerts (Diva at the Met), Neil Wyles (Hamilton Street Grill), Stephane Istel (DB Bistro), Bruno Marti (La Belle Auberge).

CROUCHING, Left to Right: Todd Hodgins (Pair Bistro), James Campbell (Tomato Fresh Food Cafe), I think that’s a few inches of Marc-Andre Choquette (Voya), Sean Riley (Glowbal Group), Pino Posteraro (Cioppino’s), Tina Fineza (The Flying Tiger), Vikram Vij (Vij’s, Rangoli), Quang Dang (C Restaurant), Don Letendre (Elixir Bistro), Jean Francis Quaglia (Provence), Dale Mackay (Lumiere), Nicholas Lim (Gusto di Quattro), and Neil Taylor (Cibo Trattoria, Uva Wine Bar)

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If someone lays this over a Google map, I’ll happily hit all 50 things by year’s end.

The next day, Richard Eriksson of Just a Gwai Lo provides a blow by blow with the finished product. Thanks Richard (and good luck Rob).