John's Noodle Village | 823 Bay Street | Victoria

Update - July 10, 2011:  John's Noodle Village has closed. 

In a line-up of the world’s major nations China tends to stand out.   Sure, Canada is bigger, meaning we get to swagger around the U.N. locker room proudly drawing attention to our Maritimes but would it topple the American economy if we sold our government bonds as revenge for allowing Kate Gosselin back on television?  I think not.  Russia is larger still and has an impressive stockpile of enormously powerful weapons that are in no way compensating for anything, but has their cuisine taken the western world by storm?  Not unless I missed an episode of The F Word where Gordon Ramsay shows you eighteen different ways to prepare potatoes, vodka and sadness.  So that makes China the world’s fourth largest country that has the third by the short hairs with a million-man army to make sure they don’t squirm too much and a government that has managed to keep out Richard Gere since the late nineties.  Sounds like a major player on the world stage to me.

The Office Lounge | 759 Yates Street | Victoria

It's been two years since I was beaten by schnitzel. The scene was a small, crowded bar in Cologne, Germany. I had been in town a few days visiting a friend when we were invited out for dinner and drinks. As we made our way there my friend explained that the bar we were headed to was a much-loved local, known for its convivial atmosphere and generous portions of schnitzel. Until that night I'd been completely unaware of the German capacity for understatement. Surely you've heard of the Goliath Bird Eating Spider? It's a venomous, burrowing, arachnid that lives in Venezuela, Suriname, and other humid places I intend never to visit. It grows to 10-12" in diameter and uses both venom and fear to paralyze prey.  It is the most terrifying creature on planet Earth and the schnitzel I was served was large & merciless enough to eat it and then send pictures to the spider's family afterwards, just for laughs.

Earls | 1199 Government Street | Victoria

There are a lot of reasons why it might seem pointless to review a chain restaurant:  the recipes are mostly the same at every location from San Francisco to Jacksonville, and, as a friend pointed out, if a formula is successful enough to generate franchises who am I to argue?  Well, over the years I've eaten at Boston Pizza, Red Robin & Ricky's All-Day Grill, and the only thing they do well is back up what H.L. Mencken said about getting rich by underestimating the taste of the American public.  The quality of a restaurant depends more on the competence of those preparing the food than it does on recipes alone so if the folks behind the scenes have as much enthusiasm for food as I do honest work then your dining experience will be as much fun as mopping the floors in an adult theatre. 

Almost any franchise that opened up in my hometown of Revelstoke over the years has either folded or maintained a consistently execrable standard, the only obvious reason being the available pool of listless halfwits willing to work for the wages on offer.  Paying peanuts will most assuredly get you monkeys.  Dan has always been a devoted fan of the Earls chain, for which I've hassled him endlessly but his ability to ignore me is almost unparalleled.  Only my wife does it better.  So when Dan informed me that Earls would be the chosen venue for his 26th birthday I figured there was no point poking fun and that inferior factory-prepared food would vindicate my snobbery.  And you know what?  The bastards made us a great meal and I barely had enough room left to eat my words.

Ma Miller's Pub at the Goldstream Inn | 2903 Sooke Lake Rd. | Goldstream

Update, March 28, 2012:  Ma Miller's Pub has become Twin Peaks, a Hooters-style pub.   There is some debate as to whether this location is part of the US Twin Peaks chain or has cribbed their logo.  The US site does not list a Canadian arm.  I haven't been to Twin Peaks yet but I assume the food is average and the view...inspiring.

Update, February 18, 2014:  Twin Peaks did not last and eventually Ma Miller's re-opened.  Now, word is that they are again about to close the doors.

My grandmother, bless her soul, tried for most of my young life to teach me important values, things like “cleanliness is next to Godliness” and “never judge a book by its cover”. Unfortunately these lessons were lumped in with other material that forbade things much closer to my heart: “stop eating, you’re going to explode” and “if you fart in church again God will send you to hell”. Poor lesson planning like this meant that many of her pearls of wisdom were thrown out with the mental bathwater and the older I get, the more I realize that some those things would have served me well after she was gone. My entire school career would have been considerably more illustrious had I not judged many books by their covers. At the time, I reasoned if a weighty tome was named "Dithering Heights" or "A Short Walk Up a Hill" and had a cover that featured demure women in frocks sitting down to tea, they were unlikely to include scenes of frantic mud-wrestling in which those frocks were torn asunder as the women vied for the love of wealthy Lord Pennyfeather. My time thus saved I would replace the book on the shelf and continue on to the volumes with that had more promising covers, were considerably smaller and most importantly, could be held in one hand. There is no spot on the honor roll for the student who writes a book report on “Sherry Has Low Standards & No Knickers On”.

Baan Thai | 1117 Blanshard Street | Victoria

UPDATE, September 2010:  I've returned to Baan Thai several times and had meals that are vastly superior to the one described here.  I have now happily climbed aboard the Baan Thai bandwagon.  The Baandwagon?  I'm so sorry. 

I loathe buzzwords and the way they've penetrated popular language. An afternoon of coffee and biscuits in the Shoal Point Moka House can be ruined as soon as some goon drops a phrase like "Derek, we need to drill-down and start pushing the envelope". My heart beats faster, the adrenaline flows and I swell, Incredible Hulk style, to a towering giant of rage that wants to hit Chet & Derek so hard their skin flies off. Instead I sit, eat my Hobknobs and die just a little bit more inside.

"Global village" is another one that never fails to rile me, long-hair shorthand for the way telecommunications & travel have brought the many cultures of the world closer together. Not usually mentioned is that after being brought together they're split up like British children in wartime, shuffled into unmarked van and then then co-opted by people too lazy to develop personalities of their own. Growing up in Revelstoke, B.C. where ethnic food began & ended at Tony's Roma, I never learned to differentiate between one type of food and another. You ate at Tony's because his cannelloni was legendary and it was the only restaurant in town that sold anything other than hamburgers. There was never any particular value assigned to the fact that the style of cooking originated in the ancestral home of the pompadour.

Now I walk past The Noodle Box and see crowds of surly, humorless university students tucking into overcooked Asian food prepared by surly, humorless university graduates, everyone toe-top-full with pride at their culinary diversity. I cannot prove this, but it seems unlikely that deep in the hills of Vietnam, Hmong villagers sit down at meal-time to high-five one another over platefuls of hamburgers.