Over the course of my adolescence – not my life, mind you, but my teenage years – sushi went from being a punchline, novelty food that appeared only in sitcom scripts to underline how essentially foreign Japan was (‘Raw fish!  I mean, raw fish!’) to being a ubiquitous Vancouver meal, the rapidly proliferating purveyors of which seemed to be immune from the laws of market saturation.  A lot of Vancouver’s sushi restaurants are owned by Chinese and Koreans, which is in a way the greatest compliment of all, like if German food were so good that Poles and Czechs insisted on selling it.  Of course, Japanese war crimes are far from most Vancouverites’ minds when they eat sushi, which is how the most celebrated sushi restaurant in town can be called Tojo’s – yes, I know it’s his name, but that’s besides the point – I don’t care how good the fettucine alfredo is, nobody’s booking dinner at Mussolini’s.  Nevertheless, Chef Tojo initiated the city into the ranks of sushi pioneers rather than mere imitators: legend has it that the rice-on-the-outside sushi roll was invented by Tojo because his closed-minded white patrons were grossed out by the seaweed, and so he wanted to hide it, like you would with a baby.  Thus, by being slightly prejudiced and as stupid as children, white Vancouver hoisted the city onto the top rung of sushi innovation; it’s a real sheesh-meets-west story.

The North Americanization of another Japanese tradition, the competitive cooking program Iron Chef, brought another boon to the city’s culinary scene: in 2005, all-star Vancouver chef Rob Feenie, formerly of Feenie’s and Lumière, won Battle Crab against Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto in a stunning, upset victory that ended with Feenie’s presenting the judges with a brazen, crab-based dessert that stood in bold, ballsy contrast to Morimoto’s hum drum savoury rice dish.[1] The news of Feenie’s victory – and his the use of his honourary title, ‘Iron Chef Rob Feenie’ – burst through the wall between foodies and the public at large, and the rarified snobs of haute cuisine, who had for years been trumpeting Vancouver’s kitchens, were joined by the unwashed, Cactus Club-eating masses in feting the city’s culinary arts (having to some extent erased the border between high and low food in the city, Feenie was able to take advantage, after a falling out with his business partners, of the new back-and-forth by taking a gig as something called a ‘Food Concept Architect’ with the Cactus Club).  The city’s chefs became celebrities to an extent that they hadn’t been before – at one point, faced with the total economic collapse of Cambie Street during the construction of the Canada Line, the Shop the Line campaign featured Vikram Vij, of Vij’s and the neighbouring Rangoli Grill, endorsing the concept of continued shopping along the boulevard.

It’s easy to see why elite Vancouver loves to talk about how exciting fine dining here is.  For starters (maybe a little soup?), everybody knows that eating and celebrating a wide range of cuisines is a great way to buy anti-racist credentials on the cheap.  A Vancouver that has and enjoys great Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Thai and even Vietnamese cuisine (though there a fewer high-rent versions of that on offer) is a city that has come to grips with its racist past and transcended it – whereas thirty years ago, nobody but Asians and Maoists could use chopsticks, if you met a white person from Vancouver today who hadn’t mastered them you’d assume they were either in a supremacist militia or else had a palsy in their hand.  Furthermore, discussion about local ingredients lets Vancouverites yammer about our very favourite subject: how lucky we are to live in a such an ecologically unique and beautiful place, and don’t you know you can go diving for geoduck in the afternoon and twenty minutes later go skiing on Grouse Mountain!  Sure, it makes sense for a city staking a huge part of its fortunes on tourism and part-time residency to brag about its long list of fine dining options – but it also helps a city that feels insecure about its level of wealth and power vis à vis other cities to have mastered one of the most universal status symbols going: food.

All that helps explain the top end of the civic pantry, but then there’s always the bottom.  To paraphrase the British author and filmmaker Tariq Ali, the true test of a region’s cooking is its street food.  Hands down, the street food most easily found and expertly produced in the city is the buck-a-slice – an economy that likely owes its existence, on both ends, to Vancouver’s consumption of pot.  On the one hand, pizza is a widely acknowledged stoner food, which at least partially explains the demand side; on the supply side, though, one has to assume that the need for myriad, hard to follow cash businesses plays a role in keeping open at least some these places.

That having been said, there are others whose line-ups and steady turnover would seem to indicate a success built on pizza and pizza alone – a place like Uncle Fatih’s on Commercial and Broadway, for instance, where there is often a line-up out into the street, must surely be profitable on its own merits.  At Uncle Fatih’s, two pieces of writing hang on the wall that you face as you sit and eat: one is an article from the now-defunct alternative newspaper Terminal City, by a writer called Chris Eng, called ‘Ghetto Slice Showdown’; and with the (deservedly) superlative review handed Uncle Fatih’s, it’s no wonder it’s been framed.  The second piece is by a poet, who has written a piece about how the pizza there is so good, it gives him “an erection.”

Fatih’s pizza is done in the Vancouver style, the most salient feature of which is sesame seeds on the crust; it’s also cut smaller and sold for cheaper than other towns, where by-the-slice pizza is sold in units similar to mall food courts.  I’ve eaten slices in cities all over North America, including New York; just like Schwartz’s is better than Katz’s, Vancouver pizza is better than Manhattan’s.

In terms of movement-eating, Vancouver is home to a large number of vegetarians, whose list of dining-out options increases all the time.  The only one that fits the groovy 1970s California mould is the Naam, in Kits, which ought to fit it because it dates back to then anyways.  On Main Street, hippy vegetarian is supplanted by hipster vegetarian at The Foundation which, though much of its menu was convincingly disparaged to me once by someone who described it as merely stoner food – ‘I’m hungry, and all I’ve got is black beans and some mango’ – much of it is fantastic, and they serve the city’s best nachos by a country mile.  Both the Naam and the Foundation, though, seem to indicate that the nutrients required for providing others with good service can only be gotten from animal products.  Just up Main, near 16th, is the miracle that is Bo Kong, where Buddhist-style vegetarian Chinese food seems to drive home the point that being is anything but suffering, and where the textured vegetable protein so satisfyingly recreates a meat-like experience that a Jewish friend I brought there had to stop eating the mock-pork cutlets because he felt so guilty.

Vancouver is also the cradle of the 100-Mile Diet – started by two accomplished Vancouver non-fiction writers – and though the locavore inclination has been used as a gimmick by various high end restaurants, and the farmers’ markets around the city have become increasingly a part of the city’s summer culture, the ethics of local eating is still one that’s fighting its way into mainstream thinking about food.  One problem, of course, is the availability and cost of local products; another is the never-ending list of other things to think about when buying food, and famously health-conscious Vancouver is usually trying to stay up on those.  But the 100-Mile Diet is also challenged by another, competing ethics that forward-thinking people have been trying, and succeeding, to get across for decades, and that’s our internationalism of taste.  Asking Vancouver to give up on the foreign and sophisticated matcha tea and Pocky sticks and mango kulfis goes against a whole range of cultivated inclinations that came at least partially from the same politically correct place as the desire to eat sustainably, which increasingly means locally (or, in starker terms, parochially; provincially) – to borrow the construct employed by British ecologist George Monbiot, we have a contest between two good, decent, incompatible ethics.  Similarly, Vancouver’s hard-won open-mindedness about sushi is swallowing up fish stocks at a wildly unsustainable rate – leading to an increased demand for farmed fish; ‘lice and fish’ isn’t a racist joke about accents anymore, so much as a scary assessment about the pests in our salmon.

See, that’s why I eat pizza.

[1] Canuck claims kudos on TV’s Iron Chef America, February 21 2005, http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1109021886729_4%3Fhub=Entertainment