My Vancouver

Fitness and Indulgence with Chocolatier Thomas Haas 

Thomas Haas’ modern chocolate shop in a harbourside industrial park in North Vancouver is crammed with schoolgirls in uniform eating Chocolate Sparkle Cookies and retirees indulging in perfect almond croissants. Haas, who moved back here from New York after a stint as Daniel Boulud’s pastry chef, holds court in a short-sleeved chef’s jacket, charming the capri pants off of the ladies who lunch. He insists I sit down for a cup of his drinking chocolate, and he will hear no argument from me. Yet my enjoyment of the devilishly dark elixir is somewhat tempered by the fact that I’m about to go biking with a man who may be the country’s most physically fit chocolatier – and I haven’t exercised in two years.

Located at the base of a mountain sub-range, the community of North Vancouver is one giant ode to the white-capped peaks, where the homes are done up in nature-hued paint jobs and Douglas fir detailing. For many, the Coast Mountains are the city’s siren song. That’s what brought Haas here. As we bike down a steep and winding mountain road in nearby West Vancouver at a speedy clip, me in my fleece and jeans, Haas in neck-to-thigh professional-grade cycling spandex, my knuckles are as white as my toothy grin.

We stop at Whytecliff Park for the view over sparkly Horseshoe Bay before the strenuous climb back up. A passenger ferry steams by. Other bikers wave hello and say, “Good day,” as though we’re just out for a walk in the park. Haas tells me that he’s fallen in with a group of NHL players and Olympic athletes with whom he often rides or hikes the local peaks. “I’m kind of pretty good,” he says, punching my arm. The average person can do the so-called Grouse Grind, a 2.9-kilometre hike to the top of Grouse Mountain, inside a couple of hours. (There’s also a cable car to the top for sweeping vistas and city views.) The official world record for successfully climbing the Grind is 26 minutes and 19 seconds. “My best time is 32 minutes and 47 seconds,” Haas admits, shrugging modestly.

Clockwise from left: Thomas Haas Chocolates; you can't see the suburbs for the trees in North Vancouver; a Stanley Park Totem pole; Whytecliff Park, West Vancouver.

Just a decade ago, this was a city where the crunchy populace thought of wheat-grass shooters instead of B-52s when imagining a raucous night out. Now Vancouver has become more my kind of town: the sort of place where a Campari and soda is the logical chaser to a virtuous bike ride. Or so I find when I pull up a stool amid the easygoing atmosphere of the bar at Yew in the Four Seasons hotel, toting my goody bag of Thomas Haas chocolates. (I figured I should stock up for future carbo-loading.) Yew is a West Coast design statement in earth, wood and fire – there’s a focal point fireplace that divides the room – where after-work revellers drink classic cocktails and bottles of B.C. wine.

Still, as I sit perched on my stool, elbow to elbow with the well-heeled crowd in the lounge area, I can’t help but think, It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday, and this is Vancouver. Shouldn’t these people be jogging?

The next night, at the bar at Market, the new Jean-Georges Vongerichten haute spot in the Shangri-La Hotel, our attentive bartender, Christopher, brings over plates of lusty black truffle and fontina pizza and cracker-crusted tuna spiked with sriracha sauce, even though his telltale inverted-triangle body tells me that he’s an athlete by day. “Right now, I’m training 11 times a week,” admits Christopher, who turns out to be a dragon-boat racer competing on the national team. There is little doubt that the relaxed inhabitants of this health-conscious city will outlive us all.

Visit Thomas Haas' chocolaterie online for fine handcrafted chocolates: thomashaas.com

A Wellness Lesson with Man in Motion Rick Hansen

Rick Hansen is so charming that our accidental naked meeting at the Raintree Wellness Spa in the suburb of Richmond is not nearly as awkward as it should be. (Yes, that Hansen, the guy who wheeled around the world almost 25 years ago and continues to raise millions for spinal cord research.) Anyway, wires were crossed, treatments were changed and long story short, we unexpectedly find ourselves having side-by-side massages, with him warmly shaking my hand in greeting and me tightening the sheet around my chest lest a body part should pop out.

“My wife teases me when I tell her that I get therapeutic massages because I have a disability,” says Hansen as the lights are dimmed. I sneak one last peek at his bulging biceps, and we lower our heads into our respective face cradles. “Of course, I do,” he chuckles, “but it’s also a privilege.”

I take “privilege” to be just another word for “quality of life” – something Vancouver happily hits you over the head with. Take Stanley Park. As an afternoon antidote to a morning of grey drizzle, I went for a walk in this gigantic urban sanctuary, where bikers and joggers and dog walkers and rollerbladers – not to mention a couple of other wheel-related sports that were new to me – were all merrily gliding along the sun-swept seawall. I cut off the regular path and ventured onto the old-growth forest trails, the giant redwoods and Western red cedars seemingly dwarfing the city’s glass-and-steel skyline. Here, context is everything, and the city is like a whole mind, body and soul experience. (I had a similar feeling when met with a natural seaweed foot bath and a horoscope sign quiz as I settled in for a treatment in my personal spa suite at the new Chi spa in the Shangri-La Hotel.)

Clockwise from left: Throwing in the towel at a spa; a reflection of Coal Harbour's skyline; a Lynn Canyon trail; Beaver Lake in Stanley Park.

With our rubdowns completed, we put on our robes and a light lunch is brought in. The topic of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games comes up – the Raintree spa is a mere six kilometres from the Richmond Oval, where the speed-skating events will take place. (Picture a symphony hall on ice.) Rumour has it that Hansen will light the Olympic flame, but he won’t fess up, encouraging me instead to try his brown-rice spicy tuna maki. “Go on,” he urges with his gigantic smile. “And take some of the pickled ginger too.”

Visit the Rick Hansen Foundation and learn more about the foundation's research on spinal cord injuries (SCI). rickhansen.com

Talking Seafood with David Suzuki at Blue Water Cafe

David Suzuki, his wife and I are seated around a white-linened table at the Blue Water Cafe + Raw Bar in the urban utopia of Yaletown, and our waitress is sounding off the parade of creatures and creations on the icy three-tiered sustainable seafood feast before us. “Here we have jellyfish salad and a two-pound Dungeness crab,” she begins. “This is a sockeye salmon roll, there are prawns with cocktail sauce, here is albacore tuna, this is some lovely sea urchin and we also have a bay scallop ceviche – local scallops done with a bit of pink grapefruit.” She takes a deep breath and continues: “We have Kusshi oysters in the middle and Fanny Bay oysters below. This is halibut tataki; we have the first halibut of the season tonight. There are some lovely honey mussels and, finally, I have the smoked sockeye salmon right here. Enjoy!” And with that, my dinner guest, the renowned environmentalist, unfolds his eco-friendly travel chopsticks and attacks the top tier. “I am a fish,” he announces after selecting some of the silky sea urchin and slipping it into his mouth. “I consume it. The bodies of fish make up what I am.”

This is how the First Nations along the West Coast think of themselves, Suzuki explains. They call themselves the Fish People. Fish are so important to the local native culture that I’ve seen them fashioned into silver earrings at Blue Ruby on Robson Street and carved into totem poles in Stanley Park.

After just a few days in town, I’m starting to feel like a Fish Person, too, having already sampled much of Vancouver’s coastal booty. At the Go Fish seafood shack, located at the public fish-sales dock near Granville Island, tucking into local oyster po’ boy sandwiches was better than finding money. And the sweet little spot prawns at C restaurant were just a tiny bit better than its shimmering False Creek views. Organic Ocean’s Steve Johansen – the guy who caught the prawns – was sitting right next to me at dinner. “Want my bait?” he asked while forking over a surprisingly luxurious marinated sardine.

A view of the city from Stanley Park.

Because of the region’s temperate climes and early adoption of the 100-mile mantra, restaurants from Vij’s and Fuel to newbies like Daniel Boulud’s Lumière can locally source fresh fish and produce year-round, making Vancouver the culinary envy of the rest of the country during our root-vegetable winters. You would be hard pressed to find a city with more eco-friendly gluttonous zeal. At Nu, another of the city’s great field-to-table spots, I was sampling some local wines and cheeses from my designer mohair chair when I met Debra Amrein-Boyes, the cheese maker at Farm House Natural Cheeses. “These chefs are like the voice of the producer,” Amrein-Boyes swooned, explaining that it’s these relationships that allow people like her to live on nearby family farms and do what they do best. It’s symbiotic. It’s delicious. And I’m fairly certain it’s why I suddenly can’t fit into my jeans.

Back at the Blue Water Cafe, chef Frank Pabst and sushi master Yoshi Tabo are set on saving the seas, just like my dinner guest, so even the sashimi here is admirable in every way. “I devastated that tuna,” says Suzuki, seemingly amazed at his own appetite for sustainable sushi. “You won’t try to protect anything unless you love it,” he adds, referring to either our earlier conversation about the importance of camping with his kids or his closely guarded sushi. Right now, I’d do just about anything to protect my flute of Okanagan Blue Mountain Brut. But I think I know just what he means.

Visit the David Suzuki Foundation to learn more about sustainability: davidsuzuki.org

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Check out chef Frank Pabst's decadent soy-and-sake sablefish recipe from the new Blue Water Cafe Seafood cookbook.