Latest Making Food Matter Newsletter

Making Food Matter is a newsletter that comes out in this region several times a year. It has an interesting mix of news pieces about food, farming and local production. My biggest beef with them is the focus on food security, an issue I find misleading at best.

Chinese City Buffet

We all went there the other night. This was formerly Szechuan City in Vic West and I went there often enough when Sheila lived just around the corner from the place. It was decent enough then.

Now it is called the Chinese City Buffet - 100-180 Wilson St.

All I can say about the restaurant the other night is that I could hardly eat the food and some of it did not like it was safe. It looked like it had been kept out in warming trays at too low a temperature for a long time.

Unless someone new takes over, I will be avoiding this place.

Rathskeller

Last Wednesday night Sheila and I went to the Rathskeller at 1205 Quadra Street because I was in the mood for some German food in a traditional atmosphere.

This restaurant has been at that location for decades now. It is an institution in Victoria, though I last went there in the mid 1980s. We tried once before to have dinner there but caught them on a day they are closed.

The setting has the look and feel of a local restaurant one would find all over Germany and Austria, it is very authentic for that, though the waitresses in dirndl dresses is a bit much. So far so good.

We got our menus and noticed two things, high prices and a large menu. The prices were higher than we expected with most entrees being in the $17 to $25 range, this is above average in Victoria for a meal and moving into the high end. Well made food with fresh ingredients costs money and can mean you need to have higher prices, this is what we attributed it to.

I also noticed the menu was long, it had a lot of choices on it. A long menu sets of alarm bells for me because most restaurants do not have the traffic to sustain that many options. There were a number of things on the menu that require a lot of prep to have on hand or require long cooking times. With pages of options and likely less than 100 covers a night, they either have to throw a lot of food out each night or they cut major corners. The long menu and high prices almost made us leave, but it has been a crazy couple of weeks with two parents in hospital and dieing of cancer. We stayed and it was a mistake.

Sheila ordered the Weiner Schnitzel and I ordered the Hungarian Goulash.

My Goulash came with a brown gravy that was salty, I could not sense anything other than the salt in the sauce. I did not not see an pepper or onion pieces in the sauce and certainly could not taste any paprika. The meat was a combination of tender and well cooked and tough. All the pieces were dry and clearly had not been cooked in the sauce for any length of time. I let the waitress know the sauce was very salty, she offered to get me something else, but time was not on our side to wait for another entree. She did not seem to believe me the sauce was salty even after Sheila told her she had tried it. The chef and her did try some of it in the kitchen from my plate, or so she said, and she admitted it was a bit salty and maybe "too much of the beef base" got into my dinner. There it was, they do not make their own sauce, but make it from one of those overly salty and awful cheap restaurant supply powders.

The veggies I had were frozen peas and carrots that had been microwaved. The spaetzle did not look like they were freshly made and did not really look right. They looked like little extruded logs of dough. I expect a good spaetzle to be airy and light, to melt in my mouth and these did not.

Sheila had more success with her schnitzl. The meat was tender and perfectly cooked. But this came with fried potatoes that were watery. Clearly the potatoes had all been cooked earlier and then kept in a warming tray. They were inedible.

The waitress still charged me for my meal, she also did not ask why Sheila did not eat the potatoes. She did bring me a complimentary raspberry vodka shot, unfortunately since she did not asked there is no way she could have known I hate flavoured vodkas.

For the price we paid I expected perfect traditional German food made fresh and to order. That does not happen there.

I would have expected a restaurant to go an extra mile to figure out what went wrong and then not to charge me for their mistake. When anything at all is not right, a smart and competent restaurant will accept responsibility for their error. This did not happen at the Rathskeller even after they admitted they had made the mistake. Tom Colicchio has a quote in the Top Chef cookbook about it being his responsiblity to make every meal perfect because if he does not he will ruin someone's evening.

There is no chance we are going to go back to the Rathskeller, shitty food on top of a shitty day. I can understand why the focus on tourists for much of their traffic since then they do not need to worry about repeat business. I will wait for my next to Germany for decent German food.

Cook 'N Pan Polish Deli

This deli is located at 1725 Cook street between Pandora and North Park. There was a time from the mid 1950s to the early 1980s that our cities had an abundance of European delis. As all of us Europeans have lost our connections to the old world, the delis have died out. I remember as a child going with with my mother to German delis in Vancouver along Fraser Street or Victoria but there are very few of them left any longer.

In the last generation we have seen a new set of delis open, Asian ones, Indian ones, Middle Eastern ones and others. I like these places but I miss the familiar look and smell of the European ones. Cook 'N Pan is a Polish deli of a type I remember.

I come in and can immediately smell the cured meats and see the familiar goods for sale. They have a great selection of deli meats that look like they make them, this is not the sort of stuff you can buy anywhere else. They are the only source of decent locally made perogies I know of in this city. They carry a nice selection of European chocolates, jams and more deli items. They have the chocolates you can hang on your Christmas tree, an important tradition for me.

A lot of non-ethnic delis only seem to want to cater to a very high end clientele. They carry good products, but the prices are so high that I feel guilty eating the food. Cook 'N Pan is not like this, they make everything affordable and reasonable.

You can buy lunch here as well and I have done so a number of times over the years. I always get the same thing, a plate of the perogies.

Urban Chicken Facebook Group

This facebook group was started in Kamloops and deals with backyard chickens.

Another good resource is the Backyard Chicken forum

More Starbucks in the Neighbourhood

Two or so years ago my neighbourhood, the Burnside - Tillicum - Gorge area of Victoria, had one Starbucks. It was a small location at the back entrance of Tillicum Mall.

Over towards Mayfair Mall a drive through Starbucks opened about two years ago. It is on Douglas and we use it a fair amount.

Not too long ago we got our third Starbucks, this time in the Gorge Plaza @ Gorge and Tillicum roads, the location of the original Fairway Market in Victoria. This one is nice and big and comfortable and is constantly busy. I am happy to see this one open because I was looking for coffee place in this area.

Now, as of the other week, we have our FOURTH Starbucks in the neighbourhood. The Safeway at Tillicum Mall remodeled and in the process added a Starbucks into the store.

All I need now is a decent coffee place close to the corner of Harriet and Burnside - another opportunity for Starbucks?

A Good Source for Beef

I was recently reminded of Ranchland Natural Beef. This is a beef product raise in the Nicola valley by Dave Chutter on the Chutter ranch.

Dave was the MLA for Yale- Lillooet from 2001 to 2005 - a quiet and reserved back bencher that did not get a lot of notice. Dave is the sort of guy to keep very quiet about his accomplishments and skills. When he ran for MLA in 2001 he did not trumpet the 1999 award he got for how he manages his land and his cattle.

Dave Chutter has been operating the Chutter Ranch as a wonderful example of what is possible when business and conservation meet. He produces a great beef product as well as I have had it in the past.

In Victoria, Slater Meats at 2577 Cadboro Bay Road carry his beef.