Foodblogging Vancouver and Seattle

Restaurants we loved while visiting Vancouver and Seattle:

Coast Restaurant, Vancouver, BC - Inventive, fusiony seafood-based menu; standouts included foie gras nigiri sushi and tuna tartare served with homemade potato chips. Moderately expensive.

Phnom Penh, Vancouver, BC - Cambodian/Vietnamese in Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood. Fantastic, aromatic soups with handmade noodles. Inexpensive.

Banana Leaf, Vancouver, BC - Great Malaysian restaurant; veggie and noodle dishes especially good. Inexpensive.

Heirloom tomato salad at Trellis

Trellis, Kirkland, WA - "Hotel restaurants" often aren't very good, but Trellis, in Kirkland, Washington's Heathman Hotel, has a chef that goes the extra mile: he grows much of the produce served in the restaurant on his three-acre sustainable garden. Breakfasts especially good; standouts at lunch/dinner include the exquisite heirloom tomato salad above. Moderate.

Fries drizzled with demiglace and fontina cheese - Quinns, Seattle WA

Quinns, Seattle, WA - Gastropub in Seattle's Capitol Hill district. Standout dishes included hand-cut fries drizzled with demiglace and fontina cheese, and a Belgian beer on draft (Duchess de Bourgogne). Moderate.

Cured meat platter (with cheese and olives) - Salumi, Seattle WA

Salumi Artisan Cured Meats, Seattle, WA - Amazing cured meats, served with olives, cheeses, bread and wine, eaten family-style with other foodies (and chefs on their lunch hours.) Inexpensive and an astounding value for money.

(All photos by Scott Smith, used with kind permission.)

They grow 'em big

The trees around Snoqualmie Falls, WA are pretty healthy (and old.)
Here's hoping the same can be said one day for all of us!
(Photo credit: Carrie)

It was a blast seeing our friend Scott for a few days in Seattle.

He's got a post up at his place detailing some of our culinary adventures--including a fantastic picture of the cured meat platter at Salumi in downtown Seattle--and he apparently took mercy on me, because the only photographs he's included in this one, everybody has their clothes on. (Link is SFW except for, um, the ads..., okay, it's NSFW. The rest of the site is very very NSFW.)

If you're interested in vacation pictures, there's a rough-cut set here:

www.flickr.com

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

So, as it turns out, the ten days or so that we've just taken as a long-planned vacation to Vancouver and Seattle (we're visiting friends in Seattle now, flying back to NYC on Saturday morning) have been... eventful... in world financial markets.

Carrie and I have had a wonderful time on our travels, and we've certainly eaten well. :-) It has been wonderful to catch up with old friends, too (WARNING: while the text in the linked article is benign enough, the accompanying picture--and indeed pretty much the rest of the site--is absolutely, comprehensively Not Safe For Work unless you happen to work for gay pornographers. You Have Been Warned -- or incentivized, depending on your preferences.)

When we have a chance to catch our breath, expect more travelogue posts, pictures, and Google-able information about Vancouver and Seattle restaurants (this afternoon, we had an epic lunch at Salumi, the Italian-cured-meat temple and retirement project of Armandino Batali... yes, Mario's poppa.)

But there's really been only one story worth following this week: the continuing global meltdown in the financial markets, with no end in sight and only the barest beginnings of the visible consequences to come.

We've watched in growing disbelief, on Blackberries, iPhones, and hotel room televisions, as the events of the last week unfolded.

On Tuesday evening, Carrie and I watched the depressing, uninspiring, poorly formatted and ineptly moderated "debate" from our Vancouver hotel room, and we tried to get drunk enough not to mind the outpouring of platitudes from Obama and McCain as both candidates flailed about, spewing buzzwords to their respective bases and trying to produce a convincing simulacrum of actual leadership in the face of what's likely to be the biggest crisis the Western world has faced in a generation, at least.

(It didn't work, by the way -- there's not enough wine in the world for that.)

I don't think any of us can be sure about just how much trouble we're in for... but one thing we can be sure of: the world has been rudely awakened to some important, structural changes in the last week, and it will very likely not be the same again.

I've excerpted heavily, below, the thoughts of Financial Times columnist Philip Stevens.

Do go and read the whole thing; he has grasped and put into words something I've been struggling to articulate to friends and colleagues for some time now.

At the Aquarium

We spent the morning in Stanley Park, a thousand acres of loveliness on the western tip of the peninsula that also houses downtown Vancouver.

Plantings along a path in Stanley Park

While there's never a bad reason to walk through a city park (especially one as magnificent as this) on a rainy morning, we were actually there to visit the Vancouver Aquarium, where one can view (and to some extent interact with) many different species of marine mammals. Like most recently built aquariums, there's action both on the surface of the water and at the underwater viewing areas. :-)

Feeding time in the otter habitat


Steller sea lion, surfacing


Infant beluga whale (age: 4 months, still unnamed, not yet eating solid food) swimming with Mama.

Related: Vancouver Aquarium BelugaCam

One good tern?

Our new roommate
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

My ornithology chops have never been strong, and are more attuned to the appreciation of Charlie Parker solos than the identification of actual birds.

But this fine feathered friend was waiting for us on the balcony of our hotel room this morning, not a bit afraid of us (or people in general, clearly.) He seemed a little too squat and stubby to be a seagull, but we've tentatively identified him as belonging to some species of tern (a close cousin)...check out the gigantic webbed feet on this specimen of waterfowl!

He happily accepted an offering of a small handful of breadcrumbs (we had the dregs of a bag of bagel chips from the plane still in the room with us), and hung out with us a while longer while we dressed for the day.

A study in contrasts

The staff at the Vancouver (BC) Hyatt are the dog's bollocks (that's good, kids.)

This morning, while arranging our transfer to this hotel, I had a frank chat with the reservations agent about the lousy experience we were having so far at the Other Hotel, and I do believe she took it to heart.

She arranged early check-in for us, and when we made our way down the street and around the corner to the Hyatt, we were greeted by hyper-competent, professional staff who barely let us draw a breath by ourselves from the moment we walked in the door.

Five minutes after we presented ourselves, we were all checked in.

Ten minutes after we showed up, we and our luggage were in our room, our car was safely stashed in the underground garage, both laptops were hooked up to the hotel's high-test wireless broadband Internet, and we were being soothed by the traffic noises of downtown Vancouver from the open sliding glass door to our small balcony...and the noises produced by "party shuffle" on Carrie's iPod nano, which slotted into a stereo set up specifically to receive it.

Here's the clincher: the hotel rooms? Cost the same.

We had a lovely morning walking around downtown (a few pix are below), and after a short nap (a key feature of any Campbell vacation is the regularly scheduled mid-afternoon disco nap), we're heading out again.

Dinner tonight is going to be Malaysian. There's this place nearby that's famous for (among other things) their mango and okra salad... and the seven-course tasting menu for two is $25 each.

Canadian. :-)

Carrie at Burrard Inlet; North Vancouver, BC in background

Barry at Burrard Inlet

Vancouver Waterfront

North Vancouver, BC (across Burrard Inlet)

Vancouver notes

Uneventful flight to Seattle and drive to Vancouver last night; though we ran into some traffic getting through Seattle (the airport is south of town and Interstate 5 basically takes you smack through the city), we made it to the hotel after 12+ consecutive hours of travel from NYC in reasonably good shape... wanting nothing more than a hot shower, a room service supper, and a good night's sleep.

Unfortunately, that's when things got interesting.

When Carrie and I travel for pleasure, we try to stay in quirky little independent hotels, as we generally enjoy that experience more than the HiltonHyattMarriott in whatever city we're staying in. When we're headed someplace new, or someplace we haven't been to in a while, we rely on multiple information sources to zero in on hotels and restaurants, and usually we do fine.

Every now and then, though, that strategy doesn't work, and we find a place where the definition of "quirky" includes "unacceptable levels of service."

This was one of those times.

The centrally located, "luxury boutique hotel" we selected for our Vancouver stay last night presented us with a festival of incompetence on check-in.

They couldn't even manage to organize a tray of sandwiches and a couple of beers for two tired travelers at 8pm last night, despite repeated phone calls and even an in-person visit to the front desk.

Our first meal in Canada last night? The execrable but ubiquitous Tim Horton's.

We're relocating to a competently managed hotel--one of the sterile corporate international chains, as it happens--this morning. And then out into this lovely city in the Pacific Northwest.

I don't think the management at the hotel we're checking out of will forget me soon.