It Ain't All Gone

When you inevitably find yourself making a day of visiting (what’s left of) St. Jacob’s Market, you may give glance to the antique stores and other outlets surrounding the cusp of it. If you’re like me, you may take a lifetime to slowly approach every building if only because you take a long, long time in life gathering interests and acting on them. Years ago, I spent a good portion of my time antiquing, looking for anything made in Occupied Japan. I found like, two teacups. Anyway, after that, and more recently, it was a serendipitous interest in cosmetics that had me looking for supplies in the bulk store next to the antique store. I know what you’re thinking. And you’re probably right. Anyway, most recently, not a day or two before, I was told about the eatery sharing the space with both places. Yeah, I saw it in the past, and acknowledged it. But like I said, it takes me a long time to act on interest. Don’t live like me, kids. Otherwise, you may regret having stayed away from the Crazy Canuck for so long.

That’s right, as thick as the name may sound, it’s cozier and more welcoming than you’d think. Its crew is small, and quintessentially Canuck, humouring me with nicknames like ‘big guy’ and ‘bud’, enduring my indecisiveness, and having nothing but earnest at my embarrassment for not knowing what chomo (chocolate milk) means. The menu’s eclectic, and I can finally say that and mean it. The space, almost as much; seasoned with Canadiana, with a single wall of record sleeves of anything classic rock and Canadian: Kim Mitchell, Rush, Max Webster. License plates from every province, snowshoes- Its identity encompasses so much of what I have always xenophobically believed when I think of my own cultural identity. Why? I don’t know. This is a food review, not a psychology study. 

It was a tempting menu though. It took no shame in deriving its ideas from every culture it could think of. From taco pizza, to pizza poutine. I finally settled on the day’s special: A sliced beef hoagie with a posturing, and therefore hypnotizing, mango chutney coleslaw; pizza poutine, not poutine pizza, and what the place called a ‘snowshoe,’ for dessert. Between you and me, that’s what I was waiting for.

I lazily waited for my casserole of fries covered with meat sauce, two seasoned slices of salami, and baked mozzarella, reminiscent, of all things, of a chicken parmesan. I laughed tenderly to myself. Beside it, my hoagie, which, if I didn’t know any better, was a slider smaller than my fist, packed with resilient steak slices and topped with slaw. My enthusiasm for the thing waned as much as its old bread, which absorbed the flavours of the air from the fridge. Mean to say, but no less true. Its coleslaw, a little too curried with the yellow stuff and distracting from the idea of mango chutney made into a vibrant salad. The cabbage was limp and too fermented to cherish any good flavor. In two bites, it was gone. I couldn’t reconcile whether I should have been happy or sad that it was gone so soon. But that was as bad as the meal got. I treasured my poutine. It wasn’t anything in the forefront of poutiness, but I’m damned if I didn’t love its tangy, peppery, savoury meat sauce, or its crispy fries with an indescribable malty flavor. The weirdest association, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. It was rich, it was hardy, it was mouth filling. If the Canuck couldn’t do poutine, I guess it would have been a culinary hoser. But culinary hoser it was not. 

And my snow shoe dessert? Let me tell you: a deep fried fritter in the shape of the footgear, topped with vanilla icecream and rained down on with cinnamon and sugar, floating in rich raspberry coulis. My adulations were embarrassing, but I couldn’t help ooze over crispy dough with a tender, airy, chewy inside. I chopped off pieces, went after my ice cream before it listfully melted away, mashed everything in the coulis, licked the plate clean. After that meal, I reckoned the Canuck’s food could make any guy crazy, because by the end all I could think was, O Canada!




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Sexy Girl: That's so weird, that you're like, a chef. But you know, it's cool. It's hot. I can't cook. Do you like to cook a lot - like, even when you're at home?

Me: Usually.

Sexy Girl: Omigawd! Really? Why? Like, I'd be tired. Why d'you like to cook so much?

Me: Because I like food so much.

Sexy Girl: Yeah, but why d'you like food SO much?

Me: Y'know why I like food so much? An accountant could walk down the street and bump into another person who isn't an accountant, and say: "yo, stocks are down, fiscal policy is at a standstill." But he wouldn't. He might think about it. About as much as he might think about making a quilt out of all his money. But let's face it, he'd probably just pass a person in line, or meet a person somewhere for the first time and mention that he's an accountant- but he'd never continue talking about it- it's boring.

Sexy Girl: My boyfriend wants to be an accountant.

Me: I know if I were an accountant, and I striked any conversation I probably wouldn't ask what line of insurance a person would go with. I might ask what they do for a living, and what their line of credit's like; but they'd probably change the subject pretty damn quickly. And that's just it. We'd talk about interests and keep trying back and forth until we find something we can both connect with and talk more about. Movies, travel, food. Food. Food almost always comes up in any conversation, maybe because almost everyone is almost perpetually hungry because we love starving ourselves to look good. My boss once told me to ease up on the salad at lunch because sexy people don't eat a lot, and that they don't need it. She's right, we still end up throwing a lot of it away, and we don't give much to begin with. But, when you meet a friend for the first time, you almost always talk about food, because you almost always spend more than an hour together and get hungry. And there it is, the connection. With one of life's most trivial and necessary things. Eating. Unless, of course, you're someone who's totally self deprecating and, for whatever guilty reason, can't eat food, no longer want to eat food, and therefore can't talk about food (like you).

Sexy Girl: What?

Me: Huh?

. . .

Me: You know why I like food? Because an old Thai woman couldn't speak a lick of English, but the second I see her cooking something interesting and have the balls to go up and watch her make it, asking what it is, not caring about whether or not she can understand- and the second she sees me interested in something she's cooking, she'd smile and grab me by the arm to make sure I could get a closer look, pointing, saying something about a root I've never seen and saying "furniture made", or "make furniture." Why? Because it's something she does. It's something everyone does. Because it's something that makes her, not only interesting in someone's eyes, but able to communicate. I may come from middle class suburbia, she may come from -shit, Thailand, I dunno- but the second food - food I, for example, have never seen before- comes on the scene, something magical happens. We're able to talk to each other. I mean, what's a language barrier? Nothing. She's ecstatic, I'm ecstatic. Someone likes something she likes, or at least someone finds something she likes fascinating, either because it's delicious, or cultured or totally Lacanian- I'm not here to talk semantics. What I'm getting at is, it's almost always a bridge for some kind of connection. You can almost always ask someone what they like to eat, and they'll either tell you, and if they can't, show you, and have you try it so they can, for whatever reason, feel validated, or exotic, or refined, or some sense of satisfaction, realizing, they're not as lame as everyone thinks them to be, if everyone even thinks them to be.
But me? I like food because I can be in a grocery store trying to figure out which Vietnamese coffee would be the better choice- the one with the sunset on the can, or the other with the old Chinese sage holding a peach- and some Chinese woman who just happens to be in the isle would have the balls to ask me, in her broken English, if I want coffee. I obviously do. But what she's really asking is: "You like coffee like my husband likes coffee? Can we someday play mahjong together?" And when I respond, "Yes, but I'm trying to figure out what brand to try this time" I'm really responding, "Man, that would be so great." And when she says back, "My husband likes to buy these two and mix them together, and he likes them really sweet, I can't drink it. It's too sweet. I like tea," she's really saying: "Is Sunday good for you?" We could never talk about engineering. What are the odds she and I are engineers? Or fine artists? Or the same age for that matter. But everybody eats. That's for certain. And that's it; an instant connection. Tai chi may be strange to someone foreign, so might quinceaneras. But what about the food at one of them? Now there's something to talk about.

Food brings everyone together. Look at every occasion. When business men meet for lunch and talk about the Dobson report, food’s always there, listening. Why not just have a meeting? Because the crux is: people like to eat, and the meeting itself is really just an excuse.

Food brings cultures together. Lookit the British: they practically stole everyone else’s food. Of all the things they could take from India, Southern China, Italy even, they took the food, and brought it back or made it their own somehow Postcolonialized version. Forget that minorities live there. Their food sucked before hand. It was all just meat. Sure, pending circumstances may suggest the situation was bad, and I may be talking out of my ass entirely, but I wouldn’t trade an egg tart for anything in the world right now.
. . .

Sexy Girl: Are you gay?

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