Carolyn B. Heller

A "Cityfare" column for Harmony Magazine

Vancouver chefs pride themselves on using local ingredients –- but at Raincity Grill, overlooking English Bay in Vancouver’s West End, chef de cuisine Andrea Carlson has gone one step farther. She’s created the 100-mile Tasting Menu -– three courses composed entirely of ingredients sourced from within 100 miles of the restaurant.

Raincity’s 100-mile menu changes regularly, but it might start with local greens topped with a plum and shiso vinaigrette. The second course could be a hearty French-style cassoulet -– the beans grown in nearby Agassiz, the ducks for the confit raised in the Fraser Valley, and the pork for the house-made sausage reared on Vancouver Island. Dessert might be a cheesecake of locally-produced ricotta, paired with roasted crab apples from Denman Island.

“It’s always been the philosophy of this restaurant to focus on the Pacific Northwest,” Carlson says. Creating the 100-mile menu, she notes, just added “a challenge” that gave her some new “parameters to work with.” Locally-grown wheat, for example, isn’t readily available in the Vancouver area, which means that flour can’t be used in the 100-mile menu. Rather than baking traditional flour-based desserts, Carlson might create a custard, a cheesecake, or something with fresh fruits.

Raincity Grill’s 100-mile menu was inspired in part by Vancouver writers Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon who, for one year, ate only food that traveled less than 100 miles to reach their plates. In their new book, The 100-mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, which will be published by Random House this spring, Smith and MacKinnon chronicle the highs and lows of their year-long experiment. It was 12 months with no bananas or coffee, but plenty of wild salmon, freshly-harvested potatoes, and vegetables from nearby farmers’ markets and from their own plot in a Kitsilano community garden.

According to Smith and MacKinnon, each ingredient in a typical North American meal has travelled at least 1,500 miles from farm to table. “Our food is flying all over the world,” Smith says. In British Columbia, when you walk down the aisles of the average supermarket, even foods that do grow locally can be hard to find among all the imported goods.

Besides their concern about the environmental impact of shipping food from far-flung places, Smith says that what motivated her and MacKinnon to start their 100-mile diet project was taste. She tells of a day at their cabin in northern B.C. where they went fishing and foraged for mushrooms, creating a fantastic local meal. “Why can’t we eat more like this in the city?” they wondered, and the 100-mile diet project was born.

Chef Carlson, too, emphasises that eating local is all about taste. “Our menu is really seasonal,” she says, to take advantage of the best-available products. Even in the challenging “root vegetable-dependent” winter and early spring, it’s possible to eat locally and eat very well.

Since developing her first 100-mile menu in January 2006, Carlson has worked hard to translate summer’s bounty into year-round local eating. She’s been preserving quince, making her own raisins from local grapes, pickling cucumbers and sea asparagus, even curing her own bacon from locally-raised pork.

And has this experiment in local eating paid off? Perhaps the proof is in the pudding – or rather, in the local ricotta cheesecake.

Raincity Grill, 604-685-7337. 1193 Denman St., Vancouver, BC. www.raincitygrill.com.