Vancouver has no shortage of celebrity chefs yet there's something about the food culture in this city that seems to keep them grounded. No matter how innovative and creative they get in the kitchen, and no matter how much praise gets heaped upon them, they manage to stay real.
Case in point: Robert Clark, executive chef of C restaurant on False Creek. He just added the title of Foodservice and Hospitality Magazines Chef of the Year to his long list of accolades.
When you talk to him about food, he deflects the conversation away from himself and focuses more on the people he relies on to create a memorable dining experience: his suppliers.
Know Your Food, says the T-shirt he was wearing at a book signing for Vancouver Chefs 2 at Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks recently.
With C's emphasis on seafood, it is especially important for him to know that the restaurant is doing no harm to the ocean through its menu choices. He's one of the founders of OceanWise, which promotes sustainability by encouraging diners to eat only certain types of fish, his favourite being sablefish, or black cod. This past spring his advocacy for sustainable fishing won the seafood champion award from SeaWeb, an organization dedicated to ocean health.
He has built solid relationships with the farmers and fishermen who provide him with fresh products. When you connect to the people who grow your food, you get a sense of belonging to a community.
Raised in a family where the men all cooked, Clark's love of fish began at an early age, but on an entirely different side of the country. He grew up on Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula and avidly fished salmon in a river near his family home. He knew the taste rewards of catching a fish in the afternoon and serving it for dinner that night.
His cooking career started in Toronto and while he honed many of his skills at some of the city's top restaurants, when he moved to Vancouver he didn't bring with him Toronto's chef-is-king culture. The centre of the food world in Vancouver is the diner.
Toronto is trying to emulate New York so its' about money and power, he says. Vancouver is about lifestyle; it's about living. And part of that lifestyle is enjoying food.
