road trip
highway eats and the joy of 'inauthentic' cuisine
If you ask a non-Canadian about Vancouver, usually the main things people know about it are that it’s near the mountains and the ocean, and the real estate is outlandishly expensive. Maybe something about Lululemon or the film industry. Most people don’t know that it’s further north than Munich, Vienna, and Ulaanbaatar. Or that it’s the birthplace of the California roll. Or that our public transit system has more riders per capita than any other American or Canadian city except New York.
Another thing about living here is that we are so incredibly spoiled for good restaurants featuring almost any kind of food you can think of. I remember Jeff, working in Yaletown during the 2010 Olympics, overhearing some tourists walking by saying, “Isn’t there anything to do in this city besides eat?” Which, of course there is, but eating is apparently also something we really like to do. So it’s always noticeable when I leave the area where I live and we’re no longer asking which pizza place we want to eat at, but whether there is a pizza place and if it’ll be any good.
Of course options are more limited as you get away from major population centres, but there are almost always local gems to be found. The best Thai restaurant in the province in my mind is Benja Thai in Keremeos, a town of around 1500 people. After a road trip some previous summer I wrote about the Sugar Shack in 70 Mile House— named for the roadhouse that existed there during the gold rush, and its distance from Lillooet— which has some of the most amazing poutine and Montreal smoked meat sandwiches I’ve had on the west coast. So on our road trips we’re often torn between visiting a place we know we like, because it’ll probably be a year before we can eat there again, or rolling the dice on someplace unfamiliar and hoping it’ll become a new favourite.
On our way out, we always stop for gas at the Abbotsford Costco, and there’s a farm market and deli right near there where we usually pick up sandwiches and drinks to take with us and eat at a rest stop somewhere along the way. There’s another similar place close to Cache Creek called Horstings, which makes lovely pies in-house with fruit grown on the farm; we usually pick up one to bring to Jeff’s dad on the way up north, and another to bring home on the way back. They also have little kiosks in the parking lot that seem to be open at random times selling various things— sometimes lemonade, sometimes roasted corn, fresh melon, ice cream. There’s a giant raptor statue (see the photo at the top of this newsletter) on the hillside as you drive out and I’m not really sure why.
In Quesnel, we stayed at the Billy Barker, which is a nice historic hotel that’s been very tastefully updated, and has a diner attached that has changed very little in the decade or so we’ve been visiting, which in my opinion is exactly right for a diner. We ate breakfast there or at Granville’s, a coffee shop a couple of blocks away. Devastated to report that their breakfast sandwich has gone from $3.99 to $5.99, but pleased to say that I did not get tired of eating the apple oatmeal muffin.
We were there for a week, which is kinda pushing the limit of Quesnel’s dinner offerings without doing any repeats; usually we’re only there four days or so. Ginza Ichiban and Himalaya Kitchen are always reliable. Near the courthouse there’s a barbecue place that also does shawarma. We also tried HAB 97 just on the edge of downtown— along Highway 97, as the name suggests— a fried chicken & Mexican fast food joint we’d never been to before, and it’s definitely a new fave. It had that vibe of ‘independent business who moved into what used to be a chain’, much like the sushi restaurant in the old Pizza Hut (there is specifically one of these in Quesnel, but you can find this exact phenomenon all over). The colour choices for the interior were bizarre, and the restaurant seemed huge for a place that does mainly take-out, with an ominously empty display case at the front of an unnecessarily long service counter.
After seeing ‘Robin’s’ on all the chairs around the tables inside, we realised it used to be a Robin’s Donuts, a bakery and deli chain that’s been around since the mid-1970s. They were getting outpaced by Tim Horton’s as that chain starting gaining traction in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, though one big plus for Robin’s was that their donuts were made fresh in-house. Still, the competition was fierce, and the company was sold to Coffee Time in 2006, closing many of the Robin’s franchise stores across Canada. The one in Quesnel appears to have been open until more recently than that, as I found a photo of the interior dated from 2008, and a letter to the editor in a local newspaper from 2012, but I couldn’t find any specific info about how long ago this particular Robin’s closed.
Anyway, HAB 97 has an extensive menu, though I only tried the burritos and a couple bites of fried chicken my nephew couldn’t finish. I really appreciated that they not only had multiple veggie options (usually I just resign myself to eating more meat on these trips), but also had two sizes of burrito to choose from (usually I just resign myself to not being able to finish a burrito anytime I order one). We went twice, on our first night there and again on our last, and I’m a little ashamed to say I got the falafel burrito both times rather than trying something else, because it was just that good.
There are certain cuisines that people like to get weird about the ‘authenticity’ of— Mexican, Italian, Korean, Chinese, to name a few— and other writers have written about that a lot better than I can, but this quest for authenticity tends to be divorced from the realities of what the people who have connections to these places actually eat or cook. When we say ‘authentic’, do we mean food created or cooked by the people from that place or culture? Or do we mean food that is traditional to that place or culture? Or some much more limiting combination of the two?
People often have strong feelings about when something they’re eating is not authentic, but it appears less straightforward to articulate when it is, and why or how that’s desirable. We all seem to understand that the Flaming Wok in the mall food court is not authentically Chinese, but at dim sum, how many are going to order the chicken feet? Old Spaghetti Factory is hardly considered authentically Italian, but how many will order the spaghetti al nero di seppia (pasta in squid ink sauce) if they travel to the Italian coast? This ‘authenticity’ must therefore be suitable for western palates without appearing to cater specifically to their tastes. Butter chicken didn’t exist until the British invaded India. Bánh mì is a product of French imperialism in Vietnam.
I mention all this because when I sat down to write, I almost felt a need to apologise for the fact that HAB 97 is almost certainly owned and operated by Lebanese-Canadians, when in reality, that is part of its charm. Why wouldn’t I be excited that I could get a burrito with all the usual fixings and some delicious, crispy falafel? Why wouldn’t it be a feature, not a bug, that the barbecue place has both southern-style pulled pork and chicken shawarma? Why wouldn’t it be fascinating that most of the popular rolls served in Vancouver’s wealth of sushi restaurants would be barely recognisable as sushi in Japan?
We spent a couple of evenings reading books at Barkerville Brewing just to decompress after spending the day around three kids under twelve, which was nicer than sitting around reading in the hotel. I keep forgetting they also have pizza there now (they didn’t have food the first few years they were open); maybe next year we’ll remember to try it. (The bar staff thought our reading date was very cute.)
On the way home we stopped for lunch in 100 Mile House, a place that’s been kind of cursed for us in the past. We usually eat at the A&W if we stop there, after trying two not-great restaurants that have since closed down. A promising-looking brewery, Cask & Cleaver, opened there a year or two ago, but they’re closed on Mondays which tends to be when we drive back, and this year we were coming through on a Tuesday so we were willing to try again. The beer was excellent (I tried the pineapple vanilla sour and Jeff got the hazy IPA) and the food was perfectly good brew pub food, which is to say, it didn’t disappoint me and nor did it particularly blow my mind. I would gladly stop there again.
We couldn’t go our usual route on Highway 99 home, so we took Highway 1 and stopped at The Barley Merchant in Langley for a late dinner. Despite the fact that we were both braindead and desperate for food it was kind of nice to be there a little later, so that the patio had cooled off and the place was occupied but not slammed the way it tends to be around 6 or 7pm. I got the flatbread with black garlic compound butter, sun-dried tomatoes, confit shallots, and chimichurri (I added bacon because I was so hungry but I’m certain it’s delicious as is, too).
This was our first road trip since moving to this apartment and one huge bonus was that because we now park in a gated garage, we didn’t feel compelled to take multiple trips up and down to empty the car completely when we finally arrived home at 10:30pm. I’m sorry I don’t have any home cooking to share with you this week! We literally only ate hot dogs and leftovers and rice both before and after the trip, but I promise to make it up to you soon.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so any donations, especially while I’m still looking for work, are greatly appreciated. Anyway, I have not been watching the Olympics really, but I have been enjoying the memes.