Food-o-File
Virginia B. Wood will get back to the restaurant news and advisories next week; for now, she just has to tell you about Timothy Taylor's debut novel, which has quite the culinary theme its own self.
By Virginia B. Wood, Fri., Aug. 30, 2002
Late Summer Reading
Next week, we'll start out the new Chronicle year and school semester with plenty of restaurant news and event advisories, but for this week, here's a review of a new novel with a culinary theme that I read over the summer. Bon appetit!
In the mind of fictional Vancouver chef Jeremy Papier, restaurant cooks are either Crips or Bloods, and he's definitely a Blood. According to Jeremy, Crips are self-styled "artists" who practice "post-national" culinary fusion, plenty of architectural food styling, and innovation for its own sake, i.e. "classic ingredient A plus exotic ingredient B plus totally unexpected strange ingredient C equals wacky dish D ..." Bloods like Jeremy, on the other hand, revere culinary traditions and are linked to local food by "inheritance or adoption of a culinary culture." Blood cooking is based on the principle that the best food comes naturally from the terroir. In Stanley Park (Counterpoint, $25), the debut novel from award-winning Canadian short story writer Timothy Taylor, chef Jeremy serves up "honest, coherent Blood cooking" in the ill-fated Monkey's Paw Bistro with his uncompromising sous chef Jules Capelli. As long as the narrative focuses on the restaurant, Stanley Park is pretty engaging. It's only when the author thrashes around in the wilds of the actual Stanley Park with Jeremy's father, a "participatory anthropologist" studying the park's homeless population and attempting to solve a decades-old murder mystery, that the book repeatedly sputters and stalls.
When the unappetizing alternative ingredients of the novel are on the front burner, I would invariably find myself skimming pages, marking time until the restaurant story would re-emerge. The book is at its best when Jeremy is planning menus with Jules, kiting credit card payments to keep the bistro afloat, and finally selling both the Monkey's Paw and his culinary soul to creepy financial backer Dante Beal. The aptly named Dante, owner of a multinational chain of coffeehouses called Inferno International Coffee (can you say Starbucks?), had been biding his time, waiting for the Bistro to fail so as to replace it with Gerriamo's with Jeremy as chef. Perhaps it's my own perverse sense of humor that delights in the casting of the head of an omnivorous chain outfit as both the devil and a new brand of literary villain, but the passages describing the invention of Gerriamo's deserve four stars for satire in my estimation.
Taylor, whose Silent Cruise: A Novella and Stories, will be out in November, does manage to whisk most of the novel's disparate components into one dish near the end when Jeremy prepares a definitive Blood meal for Dante and his mob of ultra-hip foodies at Gerriamo's opening night bash. Jeremy's triumph over the soulless Dante with the reclamation of his own culinary soul is a delicious thing to read. While I'd dearly love to see that particular meal served to every mercenary real estate developer who cavalierly replaces homegrown businesses with generic chain schlock, I have to admit I would have liked Stanley Park twice as much with only half the meal. The tale of Jeremy's restaurant and his epic struggle with Dante is meaty enough to stand alone as a satisfying entrée. The unsolved murder mystery is an annoying, unnecessary side dish.
Oops!
Unfortunately, both the address and phone number for the Backstage Steakhouse & Garden Bar that appeared in "Food-o-File" last week were in error. The address is 21814 W. Hwy. 71, and the phone number is 264-2223. Our sincerest apologies to the private citizen who got all the calls for dinner reservations.
