Canada's National SHAME ( warning: bad food contained within )

Apparently there was some event happening in Vancouver that involved a lot of journalists visiting and reviewing our food. From what I've read it was all very positive, and I can vouch for the fact that Vancouver does seem to overflow with wonderful restaurants at every turn. ( Just avoid Chinatown late at night, trust me - that one place that's open? You don't want to go there. ) You can get everything seemingly everywhere, and from the amount of eateries per square kilometer, I wonder if any Vancouverite actually cooks dinner anymore ( other than those working at said restaurants, that is ).

Inevitably, however, Canada's true paucity of a national cuisine came to light. We're a country, for the most part, of immigrants ( and I'm pretty sure even our modern-day first nation's people would not welcome a return to a pre-colonial diet ), and so the great food in Vancouver is always someone else's. We have our own farms and fisheries, sure, but we're cooking Chinese, Greek, Indian, and a very long list of et ceteras.

To find a main course of some national repute ( BC can offer Nanaimo bars for dessert, best eaten in a bar, in Nanaimo ), you have to leave the blooming cherry trees of British Columbia's west coast, and travel to a barren, desolate, arctic place beyond even the most frigid reaches of eastern Ontario, known as Quebec. People here are rumored to be French, but given that they make neither wine, perfume, nor successful revolutions, I often have my suspicions. To compound that, the national dish of Quebec is a concoction known as poutine, something that many of these food critics from abroad spoke of with an odd sort of wonder.

Never wanting to remain ignorant of what represents us to the outside world, I decided to hunt down this dish in my locale. Finding a Quebec-styled fast food joint nearby, me and my mother decided head out and experience it for ourselves. God - protecting drunks, fools, and little children - let us walk unknowingly into gastronomic damnation.

The place itself seemed an eerie forewarning, abandoned by all but the man behind the counter. We ordered two poutines - mine with "smoked meat" of unknown provenance and hers without - and two spruce beers.

Sipping her spruce bear, mother commented "It's like cream soda... and... turpentine," and promptly put the cap back on.

When the poutines arrived, we started to have an inkling of what we'd gotten outselves into.

The sight of poutine is not for those with a weak constitution. Fries appear drowning in a dark substance, related to gravy but with a stringy, coagulating texture and an eerie shine, in which what appear to be ghost-white blobs of fat are floating.

Skewering one of the blobs with a fork, my mother took a bite. "It's squeaky, like erasers," she opined.

Feeling I was on safer territory with the meat, I decided to try a piece. The only thing sure in its existence - I've yet to ascertain the animal - is that is was most definitely smoked, but how, and with what, remains a riddle for future ages to solve. Perhaps it resided in an ashtray for a month; perhaps it dangled ornamentally from a tailpipe of an SUV. Either way, the taste was sincerely petrochemical.

The "gravy" itself had an odd habit of being extremely difficult to swallow, somehow attaining a texture identical to phlegm, which slowed down an already unpleasant eating process. Perhaps mercifully, it had almost no flavor in itself.

The cheese had defeated my mother, who had stopped eating after two bites. Truly, it's lukewarm temperature and distinct rubbery texture endeared itself to no-one, and had a milk-going-off taste that at least highlighted its origins.

The fries, to be true in recounting this experience, were greasy, soggy ( naturally ), but all in all, harmless. Good is not the right word, for they were only good in the sense of people who see an accident and do nothing are "good". The horror that surrounded them was too intense for those pieces of potato to be considered innocent.

By some force of will I ate the whole plate simply because I wanted to say I'd done it. It was one of the bravest things I've ever done, if you'll forgive a lack of modesty, and half the challenge was in preventing it coming right back up as soon as I'd eaten it.

I am Canadian, I survived poutine, and yes, I think myself and all who've faced their inner demons - and the ones huddling on the plate in front of them - deserve a gold medal.

You have been warned!

Not sure. Me and a friend were there late at night, and found Chinatown shut down tight. The nearest open Chinese place was a little ways out of Chinatown proper, down on Main, just slightly up - I think - E. Georgia. We called it "House of Mouse" for a little friend who showed up during dinner...

Out, demons, out!

Actually, spruce beer wasn't too bad ( though mom hated it ). It's only "beer" in the sense that root beer is beer, though. It tasted a bit like Mountain Dew with a slight spruce flavor. I think I'd like it if it wasn't sweet and more like a dry/sparkling kind of refreshment ( like club soda infused with spruce, or something ).

Another foreign idea that worked well when transplanted here. These are great - an ice wine from Tinhorn Creek was the best wine I've had. If I didn't hate the effect alcohol has on me I'd definitely be exploring our local wines more.


The weird thing is, the only time I've ever seen Canadian bacon is in the US, and in the UK ( sold as gammon ). Never here.

I've never had it ( only used molasses, as maple syrup is on the pricey side ), but I may have to give it a whirl.


I think a lot of the US cuisines are immigrant cuisines that evolved into something new there. Certainly American Chinese, American Italian and American Mexican show a large difference between what's served in most places states-side and their home country originals.

I love Creole cooking though. New Orleans was, all in all, more scary than fun, but the food was an unquestionable highlight.

Interesting! I'll be down in San Francisco at the end of this month... I wonder if they'll have any left over from the holiday season?

I wish it was more of an adventure than it is, but for the most part, what sticks in my mind is the ruinous level of poverty I saw, the endless crumbling houses, the sheer filth of much of the city outside the well-touristed areas. I was expecting it to not be in great shape after all it's been through, but I saw something that looked more like Haiti than the USA. Most interestingly, I was traveling with a man who'd spent most of his life there, and some of the most dire areas were apparently much the same before the hurricane.

I love how the locals talk about it, though. "We were caught in a gun fight last night, and you know what - the shooters were white! That's the first time I've seen that this month." ( I swear I am not making this up. )

If you want a serene vision of the Old South, I recommend historic Savannah. If you want to visit a portal to hell with great gumbo served right at the entrance, by all means visit New Orleans.

( With apologies to any New Orleans natives who've been offended by this - here's hoping things get better for you soon! )

This is very true - there is a BIG variety in American cities, likely much more than in Canada. Some, like San Francisco, I feel very at home at ( there are dangerous areas, like any city, but in general it's clean, friendly, and very culturally similar to my home town and Vancouver ). Some, like New Orleans, I'd rather not spend any time in at all, especially away from the touristy parts. Many are in-between, and one has to be careful what side of town one finds oneself in ( Miami and Seattle both struck me as being this way ).

Certainly, if I judged my time in the US by my very first night there, I'd have never gone again. After getting off the ferry, I was stuck at the Seattle bus station with no money, my ticket stolen, my credit card not working, and without anywhere to go but a run-down bus station that looked like it had phoned central casting and ordered fifty generic street thugs. And yes, it happened to be a dark and stormy night.

I can say that every experience I've had in the US since has been an improvement on that.

I was traveling there with a man who'd spent most of his fifty-fifty-year life as a resident of New Orleans. I don't think I can do much better than that, and from what I saw of New Orleans, you'd have to pay me a great deal of money to entice me to return. To each their own, of course...


Oh, shush, you, your stated location betrays you.

I really didn't find San Francisco dirty at all outside of obvious no-goes such as the Tenderloin. Probably in the US, New Orleans tops the "dirty" bill in my experience, with Charleston following not far behind ( though Charleston is very area-dependent - very nice areas are less than a mile from slums ).

Of course, places like some of the suburbs I stayed in around Salt Lake City are completely spotless, but dull indeed if you want to do something apart from staring at mountains.

It's been infamous since my mother was growing up in Vancouver. I'm not sure why it hasn't changed, given its fairly desirable and convenient location ( things that have utterly transformed places like Granville Island and Lower Lonsdale, which used to be much the same ).

I can't think of a city in the US or Canada that isn't this, and even in the UK, if a place doesn't have a generic suburb around it, it's usually a small cathedral town whose main industry is tourism. There was a great post a while back from a resident talking about the houses tourists see in Amsterdam versus what most of the locals live in . The generic suburb is a curse of the modern world, I'm afraid.