Tag: local

Gigi’s Oysters (Comox, BC)

Shawn 1 Comment

It’s been a while since an island restaurant outside of Victoria has gotten this much buzz. Online and print publications will occasionally gesture to joints on the Pacific side, but rarely farther North, and somewhere deep in my former line-cook lizard brain there is a suspicion that someone got comped for it. Gigi’s Oysters is different; it’s us lizards that have been talking to each other over drinks, on industry Podcasts like Track and Food, and through a food truck window where a total champion told me, “oh yeah, go there.. That’s where I would be right now!”

Kitchen people appreciate simple yet profound indulgences like no-one else, so it was high time for my wife and I to swing by downtown Comox and slurp up the vibe. What a vibe we found waiting! Half an hour before opening on an unassuming Thursday afternoon and the line was all over the sidewalk. Even the host seemed surprised by the weekday turnout and asked if he could snap a picture.

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Brownstone Restaurant (Kamloops, BC)

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Two cities could not be more different than Squamish, which we left mere days ago and Kamloops, where we find ourselves now. Squamish was a quiet, compact, college and outdoor sports town, Kamloops a sprawling spaghetti of onramps and railyards. Squamptons prefer their food and drink unfussy while Kamloopers relish the theatre of “a big night out”.

Crystal and I were also hankering for one of those big nights out so we squared some reservations at Brownstone in the heart of what we were told was downtown Kamloops. We stumbled in early for our reservation after scoring a cheap copy of Marquis Moon by Television over at Barnacle Records a few blocks down. It was one of the few businesses we found to be open.

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Backcountry Brewing (Squamish, BC)

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You can feel the peculiar energy as you walk around pretty much anywhere in Squamish. It’s there downtown while your buying groceries and wafts around in Brackendale’s backwoods, you even get it up in Garibaldi Heights. It’s omnipresent, a feeling of electricity that you might attribute to the towering skyline, but it’s not all just mountains so close you could jog to them… It’s right in front of you: It’s a feeling of youthful exuberance!

Everyone here is so damn young! It’s like they politely asked everyone over the age of 60 to leave and sold all the houses to 30-something couples with four kids, no-one over 15% body fat, please. They are everywhere, jogging and mountain biking, opening yoga studios and breweries like Backcountry Brewing.

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Blogging, Bannock and Eventually a 2025 Beer List

Shawn 1 Comment

Looking back, it’s amazing to me that in the early years of this blog I banged out two beer lists a year. Either I was drinking ten times the amount and variety of beer I drink now… possible, or I had far more disposable time to dedicate to writing as I have now.

Scrolling down my mid-2000s ubiquitous right blog sidebar it looks like I can barely get off my ass to do a blog post a year, which is a bit melancholy and also a tad misleading. It’s not for love… Food blogs didn’t die the way I was predicting back when I wrote this and I didn’t slow down due to work. In fact, I have MORE free time now that I’m not in a professional kitchen.

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Horang Restaurant and Bar (Nanaimo, BC)

Shawn 1 Comment

Up until recently Korean restaurants on the North tip of Vancouver Island tend to land in one of two buckets: First and most plentiful are the Korean-owned Japanese-style restaurants that serve sushi, sashimi, noodles and are always identifiable by the addition of kimchi with their agadashi tofu. Second in minority are the Jjigae joints serving homestyle ramen stews that are a revelation when eaten in house and tend to suffer greatly if subjected to door dash.

Created by the same crew that ran a couple aforementioned-style restaurants in the past, Nanaimo’s Horang is proudly Korean (there are lots of double consonants on this menu) but also includes lots of nods to the Japanese-Korean fusion that made fish-pickled cabbage downright trendy when a lot of Canadians still thought tofu and seaweed was exotic. Also, they will slap cheese on anything!

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