TEA & TWO SLICES: On Year End Lists, Blaming The 90′s And Arrested Development

by Sean Orr | We Love Lists: Top 11 of 2011. Here’s mine: The failure of mean politics (Rob Fordism) by the NPA in the civic elections; Christy Clark’s vague Families First agenda; the Pantages demolished; Red Gates gets evicted; the sham that is the Missing Women Inquiry; the community-led rejection of a mega-casino at BC Place; the Crime Omnibus; Canada’s creeping militarism; the introduction of the Sun News Network (Fox News North); how BC is still the worst for child poverty; and a ton of news stories on the “occupy protests” but very few on why they are protesting.

Two headlines that basically cancel each other out: Fighting Violence Against Women in Vancouver’s Survival Sex Trade and UFC is Just Destroying the NHL in Per Video Views, The Kids Just Want Violence. Sigh.

Dipper in the Rye: Brar welfare experiment just rhetoric, past suggests. I knew this reeked of opportunism. I just couldn’t remember why. Turns out the 90′s are to blame. For everything.

So Soo me: Dishonest realtor ordered to pay $258,000 over scuttled deal for his own home. Our very own Arrested Developer!

NDP calls MacKay an ‘embarrassment’ and urges firing. Wow. How bad do you have to be to embarrass the Conservative Party? That’s like being an embarrassment to the Bluth Family. Can’t be done.

Hahn’s solo: New BC Ferries boss to work for 60% less than outgoing CEO. Another justification for fare hikes.

VANCOUVER WOULD BE COOLER IF #165: Our Daily Paper Would Grow The Fuck Up

Taking a break from their essential celebrity coverage, the Vancouver Sun’s website returned to hard news today with a terrifying story on how many people in Vancouver don’t speak English. The interactive map is especially helpful. I shit you not: “the darker the colour, the more people there are in that place who can’t speak English”. Derp.

MORE VANCOUVER WOULD BE COOLER IF’S

Did A Five Dollar Foot Long Subway Sub Enable A Murder Suspect To Evade Police?

Or is the Vancouver Sun’s Andrea Woo just hungry? [link]

Um, The Reason Why Sales Are Down Is Because BC Restaurant Patrons Are Bored?

A little bit of morning WTF from the Vancouver Sun…

“It would appear the restaurant consumer in B.C. is much more sophisticated than restaurant consumers across Canada,” Carter said citing a theory that B.C. consumer expectations are so high that consumers are now bored. Although B.C. is the culinary apex of the country, most full service dining restaurants (think Cactus Club and Earl’s) are now serving very similar menus — menus which are successfully expanding across the country, but no longer appealing to B.C. consumers who seek ever greater innovation and variety.

I get the sophisticated part, but bored? It’s a nice idea – that the BC public has grown weary of the culinary ubiquity found in the Fuller family’s yawn-worthy boob palaces chain restaurants – but it seems entirely far-fetched. Perhaps I read it incorrectly…

B.C. diners are eating out less and spending less, but not because of the economy, the HST or even strict liquor laws — the problem is they are bored.

Cough-cough, sputter-sputter…

…while the introduction of the HST and strict liquor laws do have an impact on the marketplace, B.C.’s unemployment rate is lower than the national rate, and consumer confidence is higher than the rest of the country, Carter said. So while economic impacts play a role, they are not a key driver to full service restaurant traffic declines. [my italics]

Is that so? Well then allow me to posit that an elephant can hang off a cliff with its tail wrapped around a daisy and that newspaper circulation will recover when they stop printing dumb stuff.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the “international consumer and retail market research firm” that is making the point – the NPD Group – is just plain wrong on this one. Economic factors are the key cause of these receipt declines. The HST and strict liquor laws have done more damage to the industry’s bottom line than the public’s inability to stay enthralled by chicken wings served by high-heeled robots. To me, it sounds as if the NPD Group either landed some major outlier results in their research or that they’re actually from planet Dorkfrap and this is just a ploy to confuse us prior to invasion. Either way, I’d take it with a grain of salt and a bourbon chaser.

PS. Typical of any Sun/Province story, the real gold is in the reader comments, where you’d think a wasp’s nest has been power-washed with vinegar and repeatedly poked with sharp sticks.

“Look Like Bieber” Feature This Tuesday In The Vancouver Sun

Our paper of record taps into an internet meme sprung by young, hip lesbians. But why wait ’til Tuesday?

Union Rep Wants Restaurant Staff Dress Code To Be Policed

Weighing in on the whole Shark Club staff dress code fiasco in a Vancouver Sun op-ed is union rep Gavin McGarrigle:

The provincial government must undertake a thorough investigation of major restaurant chains to determine if there is systemic discrimination in their hiring and dress-code practices and introduce legislation, regulation, and additional penalties if required to protect the dignity of workers in the restaurant industry.

All qualified British Columbians should be entitled to work in restaurants regardless of their level of subjective personal “beauty,” regardless of their gender, race, or sexual orientation, and regardless of outdated stereotypical and misogynistic male views of what they want to see when they go out to eat.

And just like that – poof! – the casual fine dining industry collapsed.

Dream on, cupcake. It’s long been obvious to everyone above the age of 12 that certain chain restaurants like to hire particular “body types” to toil for a knuckle-dragging customer base that appreciates food as much as a good dick joke. It isn’t going to change, and to enlist the government to further regulate an industry already mired in red tape isn’t all that helpful. If people feel so strongly about it, they can choose not to dine out at restaurants that are transparently misogynistic in their hiring practices and dress codes.

But hey, here’s an idea: what if this same newspaper – The Vancouver Sun – ceased their own objectification of women? Perhaps we’d then make some real progress toward whatever it is that angry Mr. McGarrigle is on about (a lonely Utopia without tits?). To wit, on the Sun’s website right now I see one girl in a bikini, one in nothing but a bra and garter belt, and another being hoisted aloft by David Hasselhoff with her ass hanging out. Indeed, when the Sun isn’t gossiping about the Twilight stars’ whereabouts, Lady Gaga and Ultimate Fighting, it’s a quick descent into a teenage wankfest. Truly, holier-than-thou stories like this are so much sexier without their regular side orders of hypocrisy.

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.

Free Ziptrek Rides Across Robson Square Begin Tomorrow

From Vancouver Sun blogger John Biehler…

Thanks to ZipTrek EcoTours for putting this on. It opens to the general public FOR FREE on Friday, February 12th. You can watch people ride it on their webcam.

Poor young John looks like he’d rather be playing Galaga, despite the occasional yelp (at 52 seconds in I think he polymorphs into his D&D character). His co-pilot, the lady looking shit scared to his right, appears to be blogger Rebecca Bollwitt of Miss 604 fame. A bit of a screamer. Good times.

Headline Fail: Vancouver Sun Really Doesn’t Like Jack Layton

I’ve always thought the Sun was right of center on a number of issues, but never thought they’d pull a Fox News on a left of center pol just diagnosed with cancer. Typo or not, stay classy.

“Cellared In Canada” Fiasco Slowly Spinning Towards Drain

Good news from the Vancouver Sun:

Two of Canada’s largest winemakers said Thursday they are going to change the labeling of their bulk import wines in response to consumer backlash over selling them as B.C. wine.

They never intended to mislead consumers, John Peller, president of Andrew Peller Ltd. and Eric Morham, president of Vincor Canada, said in an exclusive interview with the editorial board of The Vancouver Sun. New label concepts are already in the works, they said.

“We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear,” said Peller.

I think it was the monkey throwing its own feces that did it.

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