Vancouverites love their food, whether it comes from a truck, in a cone, wrapped in seaweed, or photographed on a plate. Richard Wolak of Vancouver Foodster has recently launched Food Talks, a new series that will bring foodies, food lovers, chefs, authors, and others together to discuss — you guessed it — food in Vancouver. The impressive line-up for the very first event, happening next week, starts the series off with a bang.
Speakers
Chef Trevor Bird (Twitter: @83TBird) opened his new restaurant Fable Kitchen in Kitsilano in May and also runs his own catering business, Trevor Bird Cooking. He has also still in the running for this season of Top Chef Canada on the Food Network.
Stephanie Yuen (Blog: BeyondChopsticks) is the Author of the Douglas & McIntyre published “East Meets West” Cookbook (released May 2012). She was a food columnist for CBC Radio 1, and she now writes for Edible Canada and What’s On magazine, contributes to the Vancouver Sun and appears frequently on radio and TV. Stephanie also co-founded the Vancouver Chinese Restaurant Awards.
Mike McDermid is the Ocean Wise Manager at the Vancouver Aquarium (Twitter: @Ocean_Wise), a conservation program created to educate and empower consumers about issues surrounding sustainable seafood. Ocean Wise works directly with restaurants and markets to help them make ocean-friendly buying decisions based on the most current scientific information, and provides an easily recognizable eco-logo to mark these products.
Hunter J. Moyes (Twitter: @hunterjmoyes) is currently one of the Chefs and event organizers behind East Vancouver’s Waldorf Hotel and is about to launch a non-profit organization called The Tiffin Project with a group of restaurants in Vancouver who’d like to see if they can try to phase out TO GO packaging in their businesses while raising money to subsidize their purchasing of local ingredients at the same time.
Roberta LaQuaglia (Twitter: @VanMarkets) is the Operations Manager for Vancouver Farmers Markets (VFM), a non-profit society that brings locally produced food to urban consumers through the creation of pop-up plazas of commerce across the city.
Tickets
The event will run from 7:00pm until 9:00pm at W2 Media Cafe (111 West Hastings). Tickets are available online now for $30 or $100 for a 4-person pack.
The evening will include appetizers from W2 Media Cafe, talks from the speakers, a question and answer period, and will wrap up with prize draws and a glass of red or white wine for participants. Food Talks also has a designated charity partner, Growing Chefs, who will receive partial proceeds from each ticket purchased.
The City of Surrey, known previously as the City of Parks, is gaining recognition for a new feature — public art. Under SkyTrain lines, in parks, and around growing urban centres, you can discover Surrey’s public art pieces through their ArtWalk mobile application.
Unfortunately once I turned off my location settings, the app set my location by default and I couldn’t view the entire city’s search results. That, or the rest of the city’s art pieces haven’t yet been entered into the app. Either way, the results I came up with were incomplete and only showed Gateway, Holland Park, and the Civic Centre area.
Online, you can search Surrey’s art listings by neighbourhood to find glass, mosaic, light modal pieces and all of the art located in public spaces. City Centre, Whalley, Fleetwood, Guildford, Newton, Cloverdale, and South Surrey are all listed.
The application was developed in partnership with the Virtual Museum of Canada, an initiative of the Department of Canadian Heritage. ArtWalk is available for free download for iPhone and Android right now. I’m not sure how old it is — I might have jumped the gun on promoting it — but I hope that other locations will soon be available on the map, regardless of current location, for the sake of trip planning.
The Whitecaps Foundation, the charitable arm of Vancouver Whitecaps FC, is hosting a special event at Grouse Mountain on Sunday, June 17, 2012 for Father’s Day.
The day will include lunch, soccer activities with Whitecaps FC players, Skyride views, and the Grouse Grind — if you and Dad are up for the challenge. The Whitecaps women’s team will be on site as well and there will be plenty of photo opportunities and the chance to get autographs.
Sign up for the Grouse Grind will begin at 10:00am, with the group climb starting at 10:30am. Those wishing to take the Skyride up can do so around 11:00am. Lunch and youth soccer activities will be between 11:30am and 1:00pm, with a group soccer event from 1:00pm to 2:00pm up on the ‘Peak of Vancouver’.
There will be a silent auction, benefitting the Whitecaps Foundation, and participants can enjoy everything else that Grouse Mountain has to offer.
Registration for the day is $195 for a family of four (2 adults, 2 youth), $90 per adult or $35 per youth. This includes lunch and all of the day’s activities.
If you are planning on doing the Grouse Grind be sure to prepare yourself for the 2.9km climb and wear suitable footwear.
The Google Street Views vehicle (or bike) can be seen capturing our streets and thoroughfares every now and then, updating its mapping systems. On occasion, the cameras pick up snapshots of daily life and that’s where Street View Funny comes in. They create an archive of some of the rare, odd, or humorous captures created by Google Street Views. This morning, they discovered the Vancouver Canucks in San Jose, hanging out by their bus in a shopping district.
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The scene was captured in May of 2011 so that would have been the time that Vancouver was playing San Jose. This has not been confirmed but fans are able to pick out a few of our players from this view.
Street View Funny has also featured Google Maps Street View archives of crimes in progress, wardrobe malfunctions, animals, and people “saluting” the street car camera in various ways. Each week they feature a Top 5 list but you can also search their most popular finds, sorted by date. Note: Some of the content is not suitable for younger audiences.
The last sighting of the Google Street Views cameras locally was at Langara College as they became a part of the Google Campus Mapping project.
Thanks to @StreetViewFunny for sending me a message about this.
Heritage Vancouver recently released its list of the Top 10 Endangered Heritage Sites for 2012 and the Main Post Office on Georgia made the top of the list. It’s the focus of this week’s Vancouver Icons series.
Photo credit:
jmv on Flickr
Before this branch opened, Vancouver’s mail came through the post office at what is now Sinclair Centre, starting in 1910.
From Heritage Vancouver: “The opening of the Main Post Office in 1958 marked a new phase in Vancouver’s development and growth as a regional centre in the postwar era. Today however, more than 50 years after this complex opened to the public, Canada Post’s operations have changed so extensively that a new Regional Mail Handling Facility is under construction near the airport, leaving the future of this fine building in doubt.” [Read full Endangered Site listing]
We might know the Main Post Office building for its giant Canadian flag, sported during the week of Canada Day, or for its cheap evening parking it’s after hours and you’re heading to the QE Theatre for a show. However this behemoth contains over 600,000 square feet of space, ramps, a helipad, elevators, and a 2,400-foot long underground conveyor belt that used to link the system to the trains coming into Waterfront station.
I found this City document about the tunnel and used it in a previous post about downtown tunnels:
“In 1954 the federal Minister of Public Works applied to the City for a ninety-nine (99) year lease of lands beneath City streets to construct and operate a mail transfer tunnel from the main CPR station to the newly to be constructed main Post Office. At that time the mail came to Vancouver on the CPR railway. As the Vancouver Charter then read, a lease in excess of thirty (30) years required the assent of the electors… The thirty (30) year lease with the federal Minister of Public Works was entered into October 10, 1957. Shortly after completion of the tunnel, mail began to move by air and so the tunnel was never used.”
The Main Post Office’s future is now uncertain and that is why it’s sitting on Heritage Vancouver’s list: “The federal government plans to sell the building and to date, no potential buyer has agreed to purchase and save this public landmark.”
Photo credit:
jmv on Flickr
Update: January 2013: The Main Post Office building has been sold. “Canada Post has confirmed to Global News that their main Vancouver office on Georgia and Homer has been sold to B.C. Investment Management Corporation.”
Other Vancouver Icons posts include: Planetarium Building, Lord Stanley Statue, Vancouver Library Central Branch, Victory Square, Digital Orca, The Crab Sculpture, Girl in Wetsuit, The Sun Tower, The Hotel Vancouver, The Gassy Jack Statue, The Marine Building, and The Angel of Victory. Should you have a suggestion for the Vancouver Icons series please feel free to leave a note in the comments. It should be a thing, statue, or place that is very visible and recognizable to the public.
