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Food Media Omnibus #522: Scary Restaurant Locations & Taxes

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a late afternoon good time at The Diamond on Gastown's Gassy Jack Square...

This week in the Globe & Mail, Alexandra Gill goes on a Julia & Julia safari by reviewing Le Crocodile (where they make French food, get it?) and then – in a separate feature – rating foodie movies according to their fealty to realism. Rather amazingly, her number one pick is Ratatouille, a cartoon about a rat who cooks. Go figure. I heart Alex.

Canadian chefs and chef organisations are mighty pissed (and rightly so) that “Coco”, a new book from publishing house Phaidon that lists the world’s 100 most promising chefs, does not include a single Canuck. Not a one.

Deana Lancaster heads to the Main St. Farmer’s Market and Campagnolo for the North Shore News.

Tim Pawsey reviews the new Coast in the Vancouver Courier.

From the rocket scientists at the Vancouver Sun:

More than 90 per cent of restaurant owners in British Columbia who responded to a survey said they would be negatively impacted by the province’s new harmonized sales tax, coming into effect in July 2010.

I’m all for smacking the Libs for breaking a promise and imposing a new tax, but a classic push poll is a really cheap way to fill column inches. Asking a restaurateur if a proposed tax will hurt them is like asking a guy lost in the desert for days if he’d like a glass of water. Maybe they ran out of Bachelorette editorial.They do a much better job of it in this piece by Craig McInnes:

The Liberals covered the harmonized sales tax with a cone of silence during the provincial election.

They focused instead on an NDP proposal that Premier Gordon Campbell and his team called a job-killer — increasing the minimum wage 25 per cent from $8 to $10.

The minimum wage has been frozen since 2001. During that time, we’ve gone from the province with the highest minimum wage to being tied with New Brunswick for the lowest.

But Campbell and the Liberals continue to argue we can’t afford to raise our minimum wage because service industries that provide most of the entry level jobs, such as the restaurant business, would have to respond by shedding workers.

So what have they done with the surprise announcement that British Columbia is adopting a harmonized sales tax?

A bloody good question, Craig. Thanks for playing.

Elsewhere in the Sun, Mia Stainsby visits Latitude on Main St. and digs it.

In my Westender column, I take a food blogger’s lead and check out the West End’s Cardero Bottega.

In Metro, “Urban Foodie” Anya Levykh suffers a horrible headline: “The Food Is Fantastic — Shame About The Area, Though”. Ugh.

New York City restaurateurs have been provided with a new reason to stay up at night with the appointment of Sam Sifton as Frank Bruni’s replacement as the restaurant critic for The New York Times. Gawker is all over the fact that his picture is being plastered everywhere.

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