Food glorious food - not hot sausage and mustard

Welcome back to What I Did On My Holiday - Part Two.

Let’s talk about food, because it’s all I ever want to do, frankly.

When I first went to Canada, thirty odd years ago, the gap between there and the UK in every conceivable way and thing was huge. Even though the language was the same, I had never felt so alien in my life and I was in awe of virtually everything, particularly the food scene.

On that first trip we went for dinner in Vancouver with some friends of my then husband’s. We went to a Malaysian restaurant and ate our dinner off of banana leaves instead of plates. This is no longer novel, and in fact the pendulum has swung back the other way, with people rightly infuriated that they’re expected to eat soup out of shopping trolleys with knitting needles. People have deep and understandable cravings for a plain, white plate. But back then I felt like I’d slipped through a portal in time and space and arrived in the future. We had salmon barbecued on cedar slabs in the snow. We ate spaghetti vongole in a Nineteen Thirties summer house precariously balanced over the sea. It was thrilling.

Other things that excited me included the ubiquity and variety of food delivery options which predated Uber Eats by decades. Also the magnificence and abundance of good, inexpensive coffee was revelatory. I spent the entire trip caffeinated to the eyeballs and came home raving about a then unknown in the UK coffee chain called Starbucks (oh how the mighty have fallen). I had by that point in my life endured gallons of unspeakable coffee in cafes the length and breadth of the British Isles, all of which I had paid three times what my fellow tea drinkers had coughed up for, and my coffee invariably tasted like something someone had coughed up.

Nowadays there is much less of a gap and this is brilliant because I can’t always schlep off to Canada when I want a decent cup of coffee and some delicious snacks, but also a little sad in that the hunt for good food on holiday has become a little trickier. Still, I love a challenge and we ate some magnificent things as I am about to impart.

First, let’s get the stinkers out the way so we can end on a high note.

We started our holiday in the seaside town of Sidney on Vancouver Island. This is where we always used to base ourselves when we visited Canada when the kids were small. We loved it there. It was called the Book Town and lived up to its name. Alongside a dozen bookshops, it was packed with great, independent cafes and restaurants. We loved it so much we tried to move there.

This time around things had changed, which was sad and disappointing but also understandable when I figured out that it had been fifteen years since our last visit. I had also changed. Firstly there were only two bookshops left, which was devastating. One was a new chain and one specialised in horror and spooky books, neither of which lit me up. Secondly a lot of the eateries have gone the way of all things and it is now just a small, seaside town with some unfortunate craft shops and the type of clothes shops that you only get in small seaside towns and films about the Nineteen Seventies.

There was a Thai restaurant that we used to frequent that was still open. I have joyous memories of the food there and I’m not the only one. Both the girls immediately said: ‘Ahhh! You can go to the Thai restaurant,’ when we told them about our trip.

We ate there on the first night on the Island and spent an evening regretting our life choices. The restaurant seems to have been taken over by a blonde haired, blue eyed, caucasian man who has never been to Thailand or eaten Thai food in his life. We asked if he had sticky rice and he didn’t know what we were talking about. He also didn’t know about Thai prawn crackers (the elite cracker). At this point we should have taken the hint and made our excuses but we didn’t, sadly. I had a Massaman curry which tasted like potatoes covered in coconut flavoured wallpaper paste and sadness. Also no curry of any kind should be made up of 85% raw bell pepper no matter what kind of international cuisine you’re aiming towards. And missing by a country mile.

On one of my early visits to the Island, my then husband took me for dinner at a place called Sooke Harbour House. It was and remains one of the best meals of my life. Back then, when you arrived, you came through the vegetable garden to the front door. On that evening I saw one of the chefs wearing a head torch, picking herbs and salad in the dark, which twenty minutes later were on my plate and shortly thereafter in my mouth. It was the first time I had ever eaten edible flowers and the sight of my newly picked salad adorned with pansies is one of the enduring images of my culinary life. I also ate a kind of delicious biscuit they had made in the shape of a sand dollar, which was the shortest, shortbread ever and tasted of Demerara sugar and joy.

I had been trying to go back there for literally decades and we booked ahead to make sure I didn’t miss out. Only I wish I had now.

The vegetable garden is now a car park. The comfortable, cedar smelling beauty of the old house has been replaced by a sea of corporate chrome and white fittings and everything has been hotelized to within an inch of its life. Zero charm. Zero joy. The food was fine but nothing I couldn’t get in any one of a number of good restaurants and the service was appalling. The restaurant is in a glass conservatory at the back of the house, overlooking a beautiful bay called Whiffin Spit. In order to maximise the view, they have no blinds or curtains, which is fine as long as it isn’t a broiling hot day, which it was. And as long as you don’t have to wait over an hour for your ok main course and nearly an hour for your terrible dessert, which we did. In the end we had to request to move our table and have the French windows open because it was like being tortured in an oven. To say I was sad is an understatement.

Let’s move on to better things now.

We also pre-booked dinner at Point No Point, which is the Nineteen Thirties summerhouse I also went to decades before. This turned out to be as good if not better than I remembered and went a long way to healing the eating your dinner in a torture chamber situation. The menu is small and seasonal. The service is impeccable and the views are out of this world. I ate house smoked salmon on creme fraiche with pecans and some kind of delicious deconstructed marmalade. We had home made sourdough bread, which was so moreish we boxed up what we couldn’t eat and brought it home. For my main course I had duck with miso dressing and home made gnocchi. Every mouthful was like a prayer.

On our way up to Whistler on our Rockies leg of the trip we stopped off in Squamish for lunch where we ate delicious Lebanese food from Saha and joyous ice cream from Alice & Brohm.

On Salt Spring Island we had a terrific lunch at the Tree House Cafe, which does have an actual tree growing through the middle of it. I also had a magnificent milkshake there. The gelato from Mavericks was the best I ate on my whole trip.

We had a wonderful dinner at Wolf in the Fog in Tofino. I had an unbelievably good ragu with penne and an outstanding cocktail called Collect Calls from Tijuana which was delicate and crazy delicious. I ate magnificent huevos rancheros at Heartwood Kitchen in Ucluelet.

We had a superb dinner at Carve Kitchen and Meatery in Campbell River. The wait for the food was long, but the service was so good and the food was so magnificent we didn’t mind, and if we had been staying longer, we would have eaten there again. I had chicken with vegetables and I cannot tell you what they did to them to make such a simple thing so incredible but it probably involves something illegal.

In Calgary we had steak at a traditional steakhouse called Wellingtons where I found it so overwhelming and stressful we were in and out in half an hour. There were so many things I didn’t enjoy about it I can’t even start to tell you. Other people seemed to be loving it but I hated it at a molecular level. We had the opposite experience at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse where not only did I have one of the best steaks of my life, I also had the most magnificent garlic butter mashed potatoes.

In Kamloops I ate magnificent halibut encased in a layer of sweet potato rosti at Mittz Kitchen. The fish was tender and fragrant and the crunch of the sweet, shredded potato was perfection. The cocktails were also delicious.

Crossing the Rockies we had an excellent late lunch at The Chesterfield in Revelstoke, and I satisfied my craving for a dipped cone at Dairy Queen because I am all about the class.

In Calgary we also had fantastic sandwiches at a place called Spolumbo’s Fine Food and Italian Deli. We ate great Italian food at Pulcinella. The arancini was hands down the best I’ve ever eaten, including when I’ve been in Italy.

In Toronto we had good Indian food at a place called Dil Se, although if you’re used to UK spice levels you need to ask for things to be beefed up a little. This goes for all spicy food we encountered to be fair. I had magnificent tarka dhal and the naan was superb. We had terrific tacos and Mezcal at Mezcalero and the best meatball sub of my life at Grandma Loves You.

Dessert wise we didn’t do much, although thanks to

Anna Brones

for her recommendation of Fol Epi bakery in Victoria, because I had a next level Colomba di Pasqua from there. The Fickle Fig in Sidney also provided excellent baked goods. I had some kind of wondrous custard pastry from there that I'm still thinking about. I ate a magnificent blueberry and cinnamon bun from the Abundance Artisan Bakery in Lillooet. We also discovered that the cake counter at Longo’s supermarket in downtown Toronto did the best custard slices. So good in fact that we had four of them each during our stay.

We ate lots of other things, but these were the low and highlights. I’ve made myself so hungry now I need to go and get a sandwich.