ABUNDANCE IS EVERYWHERE

Depatures Magazine
September 1, 2000

On the wild west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island, nature is symphonic presence. Fierce winter storms thump against the glassed-in enclave of Tofino's Wickaninnish Inn, where tourists actually gather to observe them as music plays. 4 century old cedars soar the hundreds of feet above the springy soil, while only a few hundred feet away from where gray whales frolic. Abundance is everywhere. Chinook salmon and Dungeness crab are laughingly common, oysters can grow as large as size 10 shoes, and the fecund climate also breeds dozens of species of wild mushrooms.

Yet until recently a culinary delicacy on the island was likely to mean a Hawaiian pineapple, or shrink-wrapped prosciutto thousands of miles - and many months - removed from its origins in Parma. "When I was growing up here," remarks Charles McDiarmid, 44, who runs the Wickaninnish Inn and owns it with the family, "there were chanterelle mushrooms, shiitakes, every kind you can think of, but nobody would ever think of eating them. No one ever knew if you could eat them. It was far from our minds. As a kid I ate salmon, but no one ate cod. You threw it back as garbage fish."

What makes a local or regional cuisine? Not merely quality ingredients, though it's true that no exceptional food can exist without the raw materials for it. But they must be coupled with someone able to appreciate and interpret the land's largesse. "People used to come here and eat pretty ordinary stuff," states Rodney Butters, who was the chef at the Point Restaurant at the Wickaninnish for three years after it opened in 1996. The creativity of chefs such as Butters, Chris Jones of the Aerie, Marcel Kauer of Hastings House, and Sooke Harbour House's Sinclair Philip has clearly changed the way travelers to Vancouver Island - and locals - now eat.

In a short time the reputation of the the Point and the reincarnated Wickaninnish Inn has spread among purveyors as an establishment that rewards those who supply it with the freshest, most interesting ingredients. "People show up not only with mushrooms but with goose barnacles, acorn barnacles," current Chef Jim Garraway adds. "We are probably the only place around that buys acorn barnacles. People go out and get them just for us."