First off, don't forget: Fatburger, 1101 Denman, 1830h on Wednesday, June 1.

Second, I got into a rant that started after some foodie got annoyed that Rob Feenie appeared in an ad for White Spot. The rant was not that interesting (to wit: White Spot is old school), but I started thinking about the ephemeral nature of Vancouver's restaurants.

I must preface this by saying that Vancouver restaurants aren't that ephemeral. If you look at restaurants from a decade ago, there hasn't been that much change. The Naam is still the best all-night vegetarian joint, the top ten restaurants in town have seen a few new names, but the classics like Tojo's and Bishop's persist and thrive, and Nat's still cooks a fine slice of pizza.

But look at what has disappeared: the On-On Tea Garden, perhaps the most famous Chinese restaurant in the country (because Trudeau Ate There), is long gone. There are many Chinese restaurants that are better, and even in its day (or at least, at the end of its days) the On-On wasn't anywhere close to the best Chinese food in town, but it was good, and it was very old. It was also probably the first restaurant in town that got white folk out of the sweet-and-sour pork/smorgasbord rut (I'm looking at you, Dragon Inn, neon signs and all!)

In hamburgers, the very finest burgers (barring some insane $25 Rob Feenie experience) in town come from places in that mid-heritage range again, places like Vera's (since 1977) or The Red Onion, that have been around for a while, but not since my parents were young. But there are two holdouts from the earlier era. One is Wally's Burgers, a place my father and his friends ate at as teenagers. It's pretty tired-looking today, but the food remains the same.

The other, of course, is White Spot, and its history is very nearly Vancouver's history, at least from 1930 on. There's the usual storied legends: founded by Nat Bailey in 1928, The Day the First Restaurant Burned Down, How Carhop Service Came to Be, etc. It's all the stuff of a lively history and some good marketing.

But it's almost all that's left. I can't think of a single other pre-WWII food establishment in town, though there must be a few. Even among places founded earlier than 1970, there can't be that many: Astorino's banquet on Commercial Drive, surely a few others, but not much. That's what you get for having a fast-growing city with a fickle and food-obsessed population. It's great, because the new and eager restaurants displace the old ones by being better. But on the downside, The Lovely One and I have looked, and there isn't a single Polynesian-themed restaurant to be found in town. This, recall, is a genre that would have dominated the fine dining experience in this city 30, 35 years ago. The last restaurant I knew of like that was a Hawaiian place in Downtown New Westminster, just across from the New Westminster Skytrain station, which closed about 5 years ago and reopened as just another mediocre sushi joint.

As a child, the places I remember are White Spot, Red Robin, and one or two forays to The Dragon Inn before we settled on Mr. Ho's Wonton House as our restaurant of record. I have known and loved many other restaurants since then (and I even tend to think that Hon's Wonton House is a match for Mr. Ho's in the cheerful-Chinese food niche), but Mr. Ho's and the other two are old friends.

So, any ideas? What are the real old-school locations in Vancouver? Or at least, where did your parents take you for dinner? Where do you like to eat, despite the food, because of some other tie?

Eliding out the boring or unpleasant bits, here was my afternoon:

-Test-drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible with The Lovely One as the afternoon turned hot and sunny. It was TLO's first ride in a convertible.
-Returned home, made a G&T for myself, which I then used to lubricate the grilling process. Looked up the proper grilling technique for bratwurst on the new laptop ("Panoptibiblio," or the all-seeing iBook) while I sat on the patio waiting for the grill to heat up.
-Sat on the back deck grilling brats, drinking gin, and amusing the dog.
-Ate two sausages and some coleslaw.

It's all good, but the iBook is shortly to get a promotion to 768 MB of memory, which will be better. And if you know of anyone selling a nice 4-seat convertible, use the usual address to contact me.

Maybe it's just the gin talking, but life is good.

The construction of The Whip (among other excuses) has left me not training as hard as I should have been. On the other hand, I have done 3 training races in two weeks. Let's look at the outcomes.

Race 1: Tuesday nighter, May 17: attacked too much, got spat out the back of the pack during the sprint. Suck Factor 5.

Race 2: Thursday nighter, May 19: attacked too much, put in near-brilliant counter-break in heavy rain to teammate Rich's doomed breakaway, got caught in the last corner. Suck Factor 4.

Race 3: Tuesday nigher, May 24: attacked not at all, but looked good by sitting on the front during a descent (fooled my teammate into thinking I was working), avoided the crash, and from a non-optimal position managed to sprint to fifth place. Suck Factor 3.

Lessons learned:
-follow Zenya around, because he's big, fast, and wins a lot
-fried chicken is never the right answer. Urp.
-Taco Del Mar makes a glorious fish burrito, and it tastes great after a race
-sometimes the placebo effect from a new bike is as good as actual training.

That is all.

Not much to say. The Whip still cracks, Dog is still here, and everything is copacetic.

So I guess that means it's time to try Fatburger.

The Place: Fatburger, 1101 Denman St., Vancouver. That's downtown.

The Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2005, 6:30 pm. Dinner, followed by unspecified shenanigans. Probably dessert or a walking tour of downtown.

All invited, RSVPs to me appreciated but not necessary.

A few idle thoughts:

-The BC Liberals got the usual benefit of our electoral system, a comfy legislative majority from 46% of the vote. The NDP's 41% of the vote tracked their seat take uncannily.

STV looks like it went down to defeat, which makes me sad. Oh well.

Of Belinda Stronach, I don't have anything useful to say. I don't think much of her decision, which I think was cravenly opportunistic, and I say as one who does not have a philosophical objection to floor-crossing per se.

The new bike got its maiden race tonight. I had fun hammering in some attacks, but I got left behind on the last lap. So much effort for so little gain. As a bonus irony, my teammate Austin, who was working with me for most of the race, sucked up a plastic bag on the last lap and had to stop.

Adam found this:

Sorry about the large size.

See his blog entry here:

Adam's Livejournal

So I'm having trouble with some of my bike wheels: the tubes keep leaking and I can't fix them, and for some reason I don't have enough extra tubes around to keep things going. That disabled the commuter bike. The race bike's wheels are now firmly transferred onto The Whip, and with the new 9-speed cassette installed, the rear will not work if I just try to move it to the other bikes. And The Whip is not ready yet, since it is still missing cables, housings, pedals, and bar tape.

The scary part is that left me with two other bikes I could still ride to work. I took the fixie.

On the other hand, if I didn't have so many bikes to keep up, I could probably keep just one bicycle in top shape. That would be smart. But then I wouldn't get to ride the fixie, I wouldn't have a rain bike, and I wouldn't have a mountain bike.

But if anybody wants to buy a folding bicycle, that one is being sold.

But you know why? Because right now, Canadian politics is so interesting. (This, by the way, is why my friend Andrew drives me nuts: Canadian federal politics is just one historic event after another right now, and his last post was eleven days ago, and it was about American politics. Cover the interesting stuff, Serenepia! Or at least take more photos!)

Okay, back to my point: the Tories, despite various procedural shenanigans by the Grits, finally got a resolution into the house yesterday which (as Paul Wells noted) recommended that the Public Accounts Committee report should call for the resignation of the government. The motion passed 153-150.

This is procedural silliness. But it was the only vote the Liberals would allow on to the floor, and it really was a motion, passed by the House, that expressed a call for the resignation of the government. That's no-confidence!

Confidence motions are not automatically fatal. At least one time in the past, I seem to recall a Canadian government getting caught napping, without enough members in the house, and the opposition went and quickly snuck in a no-confidence vote. It passed, but didn't kill the government, because the government could just call back the full complement of its members any time and pass a confidence vote.

the Prime Minister is not in that situation: the government (if it even dared to bring a bill forward) could not pass a motion on National Kittens Are Cute Day at this point, because that would get voted down. They have zero chance of passing a budget, a confidence motion, or anything else. They have not the confidence of the house. I don't know how else to express it.

And yet, Martin continues to exercise the privileges of the executive branch! No no no! That's not how it works!

To give credit where due, the Liberals do have some thin reasons for declaring their right to exist, but let's be clear: the reason for the flim-flam Tory bill in the first place is that the Liberals started rearranging Opposition Days to prevent their government from falling. Indeed, the Conservatives challenged the Grits, right after the vote, to introduce a true confidence motion into the house. The government demurred, because there is no way it would have passed.

This is not pretty. But entertaining!

The fast food renaissance is upon us. Here's some stuff to eat.

Fatburger is coming!

They're a legendary California burger chain. I'm going.

I also have to get out and try some Taco Del Mar fish tacos. Supposed to be good stuff, and they just came into town from south of the border, too.

Finally, I hit Dolce Amore, a relatively new gelateria, on the weekend. About 180 fewer flavours than old favourite La Casa Gelato, but the stuff we had was surpassingly good. Their ginger ice cream was delicious, and I was impressed with what they can do with Toblerone.

The Whip is coming. I've been working on it late into the night, and The Whip, my latest device for inflicting suffering, is approaching completion.

What is The Whip? One hint only: Shimagnolo Velotegra on an FC SAC.

So The Lovely One and I stopped by Linens 'n Things on the weekend with the goal of perpetuating global capitalism. While TLO worked on the perpetuation, I wandered into the clutches of a Comfy Chair.

Oh. Dear. I had no idea where the state of the art in massage chairs lay. The chair was good. The chair was very good. The chair was so good I didn't leave it until TLO dragged me to the cash register. The chair was so good I immediately started trying to figure out how to justify purchasing an $800 massage chair. The chair was so good I named it Rachel.

Oh, Rachel!

Well, sort of. I did a 20.6 km TT Sunday morning, and I did better than I expected. I finished eleventh in my division, averaging about 42 km/h. Suck Factor 3.

This is the second TT I've done this season, and I'm really enjoying them. But there's not much to say about them. If regular race reports are boring, TT race reports are even more boring. Here's the one for today's effort: "I started strong out of the gate, rode as hard as I could for 29 minutes, and then I was done."

At least it's short.

The moment of the day came before my ride, when Taku looked at my LeMond-vintage Scott aero bars, and guilelessly asked, "are those homemade?"

He was trying to be nice. Then he beat me in the TT by 3 seconds.

Have you seen this dog?
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