Another Grippingly Nasty Game Of “Guess That Restaurant”

The last one was Habit, correctly named by reader Travis. Your guesses in the comments after the leap, if you please… Read more

How To Burn All Your Ikea Crap Without Matches Or A Lighter

The film, called FLAMMA (A Basic Need), is by Dutch artist Helmut Smit.

FLAMMA harks back to one of humanity’s basic needs: making fire. I thought it would be interesting to go into IKEA as if I was a primitive human being and make fire using products found there. The project also fits the back-to-basics image of IKEA and the Swedish lifestyle. IKEA does not, however, sell lighters or matches.

Ah, So This Is What It Feels Like To Be Scared Of Alexandra Gill

I was on the Urban Rush television show again today and hosts Michael Eckford and Fiona Forbes were ribbing me about working two nights a week as an expediter at Gastown’s L’Abattoir (if you didn’t already know, I’m there researching for a Vancouver magazine story on restaurant service that is due this Spring – please be sure to say ‘hi’ if you come in). Anyway, I didn’t take offense. They were just kidding around.

Still, having invested a bucket of my own sweat in the place since opening night nearly two months ago, I’ve grown quite proud of the restaurant, especially the people who work there. So when I heard that both my colleagues at the Globe & Mail and the Vancouver Sun had come in for reviews while I was off traveling, indulging in my real job (the same as theirs), I couldn’t help but feel nervous. What if it’s bad? What if it’s fucking terrible? Oh my God, I thought. We’re going to get anally raped and crucified.

Since many of you aren’t restaurant wonks (please don’t change), let me tell you about Alexandra Gill, Vancouver’s food critic for the Globe & Mail. Of the five or six paid restaurant reviewers in town, she is by far the most feared. I’d put the number of people in the local trade who like her column at about 17 out of 40,000, and I’d wager that 10 of those are either drug addicts, liars or probably both. But they all read her.

She might pen a dud every few months (most weekly critics do), but damn it if there isn’t always an entertaining flick of the knife, a slash that leaves a mark. When she really sinks her teeth into a restaurant’s jugular, it’s the ultimate schadenfreude sundae. Even when I love the restaurant that is being torched, it’s as mesmerising as watching a cheetah take down a Thompson gazelle in slow motion. First comes the run and then the turn. Once you see the claw hitting the ankle and restaurant’s center of gravity falter, it’s all blood and dust from there. I imagine she’s exhausted after writing her best. Panting. Too spent to eat. And at the end of every read I don’t know whether to burn the paper or keep it in order to study how she does it.

While she doesn’t have the power to break a restaurant, she sure can make the people who work in them angry. She’s even made me angry at times, but only when I think she’s gone too far. For a few years – when I had a hotter head – I wasn’t all that kind to her. Why? Because – gasp – she spoke her mind, kept her own counsel and could give a damn about what anyone thought of her. I’ve written wholly reactionary words about her over the last five years, none of them nice. To be honest, I’m quite sure that some of them were downright awful.

So when Paul Grunberg, L’Abattoir’s owner, told me that she was writing the review, my sphincter involuntarily tightened. I felt the fear, the very same that most chefs and restaurateurs might feel whenever she calls to “follow up with a few questions”, only it was amplified, like ten-fold. I very quickly convinced myself that, despite the obvious merits of the restaurant (which she would ignore), she was going to take every backhanded thing I’d ever written about her and use this golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slam it all back in my dumb, smug face. Yes, and with a big fuck you and a steaming turd on top. I was a liability to the restaurant, a walking time bomb. And she was holding the detonator. How could I have ever been so plum stupid to have set the hard-working people of L’Abattoir up for this? What a total asshole.

But she’s the pro and I’m the child, given to wild delusions fed by my sometimes Herculean sense of self-importance. Of course she loved it. She wrote almost the exact same review I would have done if I wasn’t polishing the restaurant’s glassware and trying not to get in anyone’s way. She probably had no idea I was working there. She could probably give a fuck, really.

Phew.

Mia Stainsby’s review comes out late tonight in Sun. Naturally, I’m convinced that it will be hand delivered by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that it will be terrible, and that it’s somehow all my fault.

Smoke Break #743: Rough Seas & Cruise Ships Aren’t Big Buddies

I’ve been buried (read: beat down) by a print magazine deadline for the past three days and in dire need of some pointless entertainment. Watch for the lady in black saying hello to the pillar with her face at the 45 second mark. Freakin’ whammo! After a little digging, I found out that several passengers suffered broken bones and severe lacerations. Not so amusing. What is funny, however, is that the cruise line offered to compensate the victims with 25% off their next cruise. Nice.

Yet Another Blindingly Tricky Game Of “Guess The Restaurant”

The last one was La Quercia, solved by reader Fabien Mimi. Leave your educated guesses on this one (which I hope proves a bigger challenge for you freaks) in the comments after the jump… Read more

Smoke Break #742: On “Ad Freak” Taking A Turn For The Violent

AdFreak is a great site for marketers and adsacks to stay ahead of the water cooler curve of what’s new in their immensely bizarre world. Sometimes, however, they go off the reservation. Their take on this Campari advertisement is a case in point.

Yeah, these self-absorbed scenesters are in no hurry at the local hotspot. They can wait forever for the camera to flash and for those cocktails suspended in mid-air to spill on the floor. The tinkly ambient music, so annoying in other ads, fits perfectly here, lending the tableaux an extra icy aural dimension. Best of all, by standing completely still, these jerk-wad Euro-trash hipsters are sitting ducks for crazed gunmen who might want to mow them all down. C’mon, gunmen…those tools are just standing there!

Unnecessary, sure, but I suppose if I had to view ads like that every damn day, 100 times a day, my fantasies would get the better of me, too.

Smoke Break #742: On Punk Not Being Dead In The Forbidden City

When the Olympics came to China the world spotlight turned to a country synonymous with human rights abuse and by any measure a totalitarian police state. But under the surface is a growing movement of punks and misfits, the irony of which is not lost on Jefford as he roams this rebellious sub-culture a scratch under the surface of bustling Beijing.

This trailer is blocked in China.

The Message To Vancouver City Hall From Anthony Bourdain…

My friend Miguel recently loaned me his copy of Anthony Bourdain’s new book Medium Raw. It was a bit of a rambler, jumping from his sordid past to his comparatively shining presence, but one passage stuck with me, ringing as it does very applicably to Vancouver in the wake of City Hall’s recent baby steps toward bringing street food to local curbs (led by Councillor Heather Deal). Let me preface it by saying that I’ve been pretty hard on them in recent months – perhaps even hysterically so in some recent media interviews, saying among a great many other unkind things that our municipal government’s “.22 caliber imaginations were insufficient for our .357 Magnum city”. What I haven’t been is very constructive, and I regret that. So I offer this Bourdain snippet in the hope that it might prove useful to them if they really do want to cement Vancouver’s reputation as one of the world’s most exciting food cities. In the middle of discussing the impact of the recession on restaurants in New York, Bourdain writes,

If any good comes out of all the pain and insecurity, I can only hope that the Asian-style food court/hawker center is one of them. This institution is way overdue for an appearance (on a large scale) in America. Scores of inexpensive one-chef/one-specialty business (basically, food stalls) clustered around a “court” of shared tables. When will some shrewd and civic minded investors (perhaps in tandem with their city governments) put aside some parking lot-size spaces (near commercial districts) where operators from many lands can sell their wares? Sharing tables, as in classic fast-food food courts? Why, with our enormous Asian and Latino populations, can’t we have dai pai dong – literally, “big sign street”, the Chinese version of the indigenous food court, like they do in Hong Kong – or hawker centers, like in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur? Or “food streets,” like Hanoi and Saigon? The open-to-the-air “wet” taco vendors and quesadilla-makers of Mexico City?

Food preparation areas could be enclosed, as they are in Singapore, so food handling and sanitation issues can hardly be an unsolvable impediment: Singapore is the most rigorously nanny of the nanny states – with the most vibrant hawker culture. The hawker center could be an answered prayer for every hard-pressed office worker in a hurry, every blue collar worker on a budget, every cop on a lunch hour, as well as obsessive foodies at every income level. “Authenticity”; artisanship; freshness; incredible, unheard of variety – and for cheap? All under one roof? This, let us hope, is at least part of our future – whatever happens.

I usually won’t reference Singapore as a positive (not least because one small narcotics offense comes with a mandatory death sentence), but if they can do it, we most certainly could, too. Indeed, why stop at mobile food trucks?

Cool Thing We Want #418: Office In The Middle Of The Forest

While Scout’s new office in Strathcona offers some pretty cool perks (one can skate off writer’s block on a 10ft wide half-pipe), I can’t help but envy the setting enjoyed by those working for Spanish architecture firm Selgas Cano in Madrid. Theirs is built right into a forest’s floor. Check out more images of these desirable digs by Iwan Baan after the jump… Read more

Field Trip Photo: On Packing Up And Getting Back To Work

Our annual late-summer winding road trip through the Okanagan Valley and across the breadth of Vancouver Island to Tofino has come to a close. However much I tried to regularly post via iPhone, reception was pretty spotty in most of the places we went. Admittedly, this was largely by design, plus I was having too much jolly fun to bother. I’m glad to report that dear Westy (pictured above at our Tofino campsite) survived its 21st long haul under our broods’ care and is still not the least bit worse for wear (400,000kms and counting). We have hundreds of lovely photos to compile for a post on our journey (coming soon), but in the shorter term it’s back to the magic grindstone of print deadlines and daily updates right here on Scout. Thanks for sticking with us.

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