A bit late, I know, but here’s a delightful Valentine’s Day story called Harlequin Valentine. It also happens to one of my very favorite short stories. And yes, it is food related (somewhat). Oh, how I wish I discovered this was online earlier today.

Neil Gaiman – Harlequin Valentine

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Phodown 2.0
a nail in the coffin

Monday January 28th, 2008

By Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver Writer

After awaking to find a frosted over car for the past few days, I couldn’t help but get a very clear message: Winter is here, and she’s not catching her return flight anytime soon. While there’s no way to put and end to that bitch’s icy reign, there is one thing we can do to wait it out. And as you may have guessed from the kick-ass banner, that one thing is a phodown.

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Introducing: The Xiaolongbao-down
an introduction

Saturday, January 19th 2008

by Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver editor

Xiaolongbao are steamed Chinese dumplings filled with soup. It’s really as simple as that, but for some difficult-to-explain reason I’m obsessed with them. If I had to guess at the source of my affection for these little pillows of soup, I’d say it has to do with the sheer ingenuity of them. As impossibly thin little wrappers precariously encapsulating a spoonful of piping hot soup, the xiaolongbao defies all known laws of physics. Of course, it probably also doesn’t hurt that they are completely delicious. Properly made, the soup inside is incredibly rich, thickened a bit by the flour from the pastry and highlighted by a morsel of fatty pork. They’re also fun in that there’s a variety of strategies from the asbestos-mouths who will down them in one bite, to the method I personally pioneered. In short, what you do is put a little ginger-spiked vinegar in your spoon, plop a bao in the spoon, make a little hole in the pastry and then suck. Once enough soup is extruded, it’s time to bite down and finish it.

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Eat Vancouver Presents: Restaurant Membership
a news item

Friday January 16th, 2008

By Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver editor

I am very happy to announce a new Eat Vancouver feature tonight, one that I believe can change the way Vancouver’s dining public receives information about the city’s restaurant scene. This feature will allow restaurateurs that may a have limited, or non-existant advertising budget to quickly and efficiently publish information about their restaurant. That new feature is Eat Vancouver’s new restaurant membership program. In application, this system works much the same way that Urban Diner’s restaurant community operates, except for one key difference: Our program is free. That’s right, Eat Vancouver restaurant members get all of the same benefits as Urban Diner community members (or any other restaurant guide for that matter) including sample menu publication, photos, links or quotes from recent reviews, except this time I’m footing the bill.

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Introducing: Fishman the Grape

Fishman the Grape pt. 1
a wine blog

By Daniel Fishman
Eat Vancouver writer
Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Well, we are always trying to introduce new features here at EatVancouver.net, but I am especially excited about this one. After a lot of talk, I have finally decided to kick-off my wine column, Fishman the Grape. The plan is to try to post a substantial (in terms of length, not value) column every Wednesday night—just in time for the weekend—and also to add random thoughts, comments, notices etc., anywhere else along the way.

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Introducing: The Summer Eatin’ Series

by Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver Writer
Friday, June 8th, 2007

“Here comes the summertime, the feeling’s in the air.
I remember cigarettes, tube socks, sun burns and long blond hair.
Here comes the summertime, yeah it’s coming soon.
I remember living upstairs, drinking iced-tea and swimming pools.”
-Josh Rouse, Summertime

In case you’ve been holed up in some Point Grey-area “garden suite” for the past couple of weeks, the weather in Vancouver has gone from miserable to nearly bearable to halfway decent more times than Paris Hilton has been in and out of prison. As summer unpacks its bags and decides to stay a while, things can only get better. Here at Eat Vancouver, what interests us most about summer is the food. But what exactly defines summer eats? Surely it’s different for each person, but to me it’s light, refreshing, perhaps grilled, and hopefully al fresco. This summer, we want to find the best summer eats in and around Vancouver.

To document our quest for the best of summer eatin’, we’ve created this new Summer Eatin’ series. to seek out and review Vancouver’s summer eats in an attempt to identify the best of the best. Be it burgers (especially relevant given the closure of the beachside Vera’s), hot dogs, sweet patios, margaritas, or mojitos, let us know about places we should check out, by visiting our new message board, the Mess Hall, under the discussion related to Summer Eatin’.

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Just wanted to say that I saw an extremely relevant Ziggy Cartoon today, one that really sums up my feelings about the Vancouver Courier right now.

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This is a quick note to say that the phodown recap is coming along nicely. I’ve spent the last two weeks cooped up in a small hotel room in Missoula with a typewriter and case a of Tab, pacing, screaming and breaking mirrors. So I’m happy to say the recap is coming along nicely, and it will be published Sunday night, or Monday morning if you’re more inclined to look at it that way.

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Although we at Eat Vancouver have always aimed to provide helpful full-length reviews, this format has become unwieldy for several reasons. Oftentimes it is difficult to visit a restaurant and try enough items such that the review is fair. And sometimes a singular meal, impression, or even bite is important enough to document, […]

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Half stars. Yup, we’re doing them now. The old system was a bit too clunky, and everything always seemed to be either two or three stars. The new system should get at the finer differences in dining quality between restaurants.

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