Great Fish and Chips and More...
by Lori Baltazar Dessert Comes First
Oyster, fish and chips with poutine at Dave's.
I’m back in Vancouver, Canada after my last visit 13 years ago. A lot has changed since then, so much so that I hesitate to say that this is the same place where my sisters and I grew up spending our summer vacations. As the largest city in the province of British Columbia, Vancouver is surrounded by water on three sides — its exceptional quality and selection of seafood is testament to that. Equally blessed with breathtaking natural scenery and a metropolitan core, Vancouver is an easy city to love.
Directly south of Vancouver, down on the southwestern shore of Richmond sits the historic, fishing village of Steveston. My sisters and I spent our more youthful days at the Steveston playground, but because we're now "grown-ups," we prefer to amble along sipping our root beer and cream soda slurpees, a nod to our childhood days.
Named for its founder, William Herbert Steves, Steveston was the busiest fishing port in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. This once-rowdy frontier seaport was home to 15 salmon canneries, six hotels, saloons, gambling dens and numerous vessels loading canned salmon for world markets. On a busy weekend night, up to 10,000 people thronged the boardwalks, including immigrants and sailors from the seven seas.
Today, over 100-years later, Steveston has progressed into an idyllic working fishing village, home to Canada’s largest commercial fishing fleet. It's quiet now, so quiet that I can hear the wind whispering in my ears and cooling my cheeks. The view of the sea has such a calming effect on me that I stop to gaze at the waters' sparkling surface. It's only my sister's voice that shatters my reverie, telling me to hurry up. Farther down, we stop to watch a film crew packing up their gear after a day of shooting. The Vancouver area is so popular a shooting location, that it's sometimes called "Hollywood North."
Going near the boardwalk, I see trawlers and others anchored to the dock below, selling freshly-caught (sushi-grade!) salmon. I'm mesmerized by the sunlight glinting off the fishes' silvery skin, their thick, plump bodies just begging to be treated with reverence in a fresh, simple dish.
Amidst the heritage sites and parks, colorful gift shops and markets, there's fresh seafood, with almost every restaurant trumpeting their fish and chips. Every Vancouverite will have their favorite, saying that Pajo’s is better than Dave’s or vice versa, but for me, a non-local, it's a moot argument. I try them both and they're equally flavorful: fillets of cod, salmon and halibut lovingly bathed in batter lightened by egg whites, a crrrunch interrupted only by the succulence of the tender fish flesh rhapsodized by the haunting taste of the sea.
I'm introduced to poutine (poh-TEEN; POO-teen), a curious, French-Canadian dish that is made up of French fries slathered in hot gravy made from the best beef stock and dribbled with white cheese curds. Some say that poutine is the Canadian counterpart to the US Gravy Cheese Fries; and purists claim that poutine tastes best only when made with hand-cut, fresh potatoes fried in lard, smothered in a dark gravy thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and eaten with cheddar cheese curds that actually squeak in your teeth as you bite them, etc., etc. Whatever it is, poutine, like Vancouver, is easy to love. For a French fry freak like me, poutine is going down on my list of Best Foods of All Time. Personally, I can see myself living on the stuff for a month, no joke.
