Vancouver
Restaurants
The Greater Vancouver area has made a strong - and multicultural - beachhead on the culinary map, and that makes the city's genre of restaurants quite unusual. A dynasty of home-grown chefs has emerged in British Columbia, and they're leading the charge in Canada. They have access to the freshest, finest ingredients, and they reinforce the supply industry that provides it. They're eager to make their mark; many have, and more are doing so each year. Culinary wizard Rob Feenie, of the restaurant Lumière, has garnered an international reputation, and a handful of Greater Vancouver chefs have been invited to cook at James Beard House. Vancouver's hotels are home to some of the country's top hotel dining rooms, among them: Bacchus, Chartwell, Diva at the Met, Five Sails and Fleuri. Wine, too, gets the attention it deserves in Asian restaurants - that's one of the ways North American and European cuisine in this city has influenced the Asian restaurants. In most good establishments-and Greater Vancouver has a lot of them - you'll find wide ranging international wine lists, the breadth and depth of which you seldom encounter.
Key Restaurant Areas
The following are areas in Vancouver where restaurants concentrate:Denman Street, in the downtown core, is seven blocks long. There are more than 50 restaurants in those seven blocks. There are over 200 specialty restaurants in the 52 blocks along Broadway Avenue between Alma Street on the West Side and Commercial Drive on the East Side, in what's nicknamed 'uptown' Vancouver. Robson Street, which runs at right angles through the downtown core from Denman to Burrard, also has a seven-block cluster. In them, there are more than 40 restaurants, ranging from the super-chic CinCin Ristorante to plain hole-in-the-wall Japanese noodle houses. Commercial Drive, in the few blocks around the intersection of East 1st in the city's East Side area, has about a dozen restaurants, most with a distinct Italian ambience.