from the Archive:

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Have I told you about shopping for food in my neighborhood? Of course I have, and here I go again, but this time we will have no naked people (haven’t had any in quite some time, but nevermind) we will have no Italians. We will have diner burgers. And where will we have them? At the Ovaltine Cafe and Vic’s Cafe and we will have a good Yuppie bouillabaisse at the Cook Studio Cafe. In fact, I think I will go have one right now to refresh my memory and also check out all the hot uniforms at lunchtime, subsequent to which I will update the blog.

Love that word, blog. Blog, blog, BLOG! cool…

Back from lunch. Alas, Cook Studio Cafe closes at 2, just before I got there; story of my life, born a month late and trying unsuccessfully to catch up ever since. Went to mosey down to the Ovaltine or Vic’s but felt guilty I was ducking my work, so decided to eat closer to where I had to work today. Somehow that made me feel less irresponsible.

Ended up at the Only, The Only Seafood Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in Vancouver. It’s in a hellish stretch of Hastings amid pawn shops, storefronts that have been boarded up for twenty years, and really last-chance social agencies. The Only has been there since the early part of the last century, 1912 to be exact, and is now run by a nice Chinese couple. They got a very nice writeup last week in Malcolm Parry’s social column.

If you are one of the sorryass losers who goes to a seafood restaurant and orders beef you are SOL here, bud. There is nothing, I mean nothing, NOTHING on the menu but seafood. Halibut and chips, cod and chips, oysters fried raw stewed two ways, clams, mussels and/or chips. And there is nobody here except almost-geezers with ballcaps on their heads and windbreakers on their backs who all look like they just came in from a round of golf or maybe a suburban barbeque. As soon as you sit down the woman shoves half a loaf of bread and a platter of butterpats at you, along with a half-quart of water in the kind of glass that can take a bullet and remain standing.

It was the most expensive lunch I’ve had on the Downtown EastSide, which is to say that it came to $10 with the tip and pop. But then, my oyster pepper stew (half order) was yummy, and so thick with oysters that it really should be called Bowl-O-Sters With Some Tomato Sauce. There were three fragments of vegimatter, God knows what it was, but there was about a half-pound of oysters, all cut up. You know, when you cut them up like that they look kind of like jelly rolls with tentacles on one side and it gets you to wondering what all the different colours are made up of. A friend of mine went to high school out here and they made her dissect clams, oysters and mussels and now she can’t eat shellfish anymore because she looks at it and knows what’s the liver, what’s the pulmonary apparatus…I’m glad I went to school in Ontario and I’m glad I don’t eat at restaurants that serve fetal pigs or frogs, though I’ve heard some very expensive ones do.

But about the stew: never mind what it looked like, it was nice and peppery, with the true dinery flavour of Campbell’s Tomato Soup hiding in there somewhere underneath the tsunami wave of pepper. Yummylicious. And this is definitely a place you can dunk, so it was Dunk City for my lunch and I got through most of the bread.

The place is filled with mirrors: one long one running the length of the left-hand wall, and one huge, got-to-be-expensive one that makes up the back wall, about 8’x15′ or so. I’d be very surprised if it weren’t one of those that you can see through from behind. The kitchen is along the right-hand wall, behind a half-wall, and the counter comes out from there and makes two loops to the left. There are no tables. Ceiling is way up there, maybe 20′, and covered with either Lincrusta or a real old pressed tin ceiling. Very Edwardian. Along the top of the left-hand wall above the mirror runs a very sixties mural of fishing, all in pastel marine greens and oranges, like the sort of thing Toni Onley might have done in Grade Nine.

Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of conversation, screams, and shouts coming through the completely clouded-over front windows. It’s like flipping though channels if only cop shows, Alfred Hitchcock, and Permanent Midnight are on tv. Ever seen Da Vinci’s Inquest? This is the kind of conversation that preceeds the arrival of the coroner. And the nice thing is: it’s OUTSIDE!