Is Vancouver the Most Beautiful City in North America?

Vancouver has a unique setting where the mountains meet the sea, and the city's main peninsula provides extraordinary views of both from a Hong Kong-like forest of highrises, from houseboats moored in marinas, and from many hillside neighborhoods. We stayed at the Fairmont Vancouver Hotel, right by the downtown waterfront, our corner room view of Burrard Inlet and the mountains bisected by Canada Place (Canada's Expo '86 pavilion that later became its convention center and its cruise ship terminal). The brand-new green-roofed Convention Center adjacent to Canada Place actually enhanced the view toward Coal Harbor and Stanley Park.

We had not been to Vancouver in 20 years, but had very positive memories of the place. The city has grown beautifully over the years, and we found it to be highly walkable, the streets lively, the retail attractive, and the "don't go there" zones pretty much limited to Downtown East Side, an unfortunate neighborhood that's the center of the regional drug trade and that we skirted by on one walk and rode through on a couple of taxi rides. This area is Vancouver's most notorious urban problem, and apparently years of discussion haven't yielded much progress. But a phenomenal new residential highrise with a red exoskeleton is being build on a block being reclaimed from the pushers and addicts, and hopefully represents a big step forward in changing the character of the neighborhood.

Some highlights of our stay:

Food. At a wine bar called Salt, on Blood Alley in Gastown (OK, would salt, blood and gas lure you to this place?), we had one of the most fun dining experiences since our visit to Jamie Moyer's Wine Bar in Toronto last year. The menu consists of a wall-sized chalkboard featuring about a dozen charcuterie, a dozen cheeses, and a dozen condiments, which you can order for about $5 a serving and pair up with flights or full pours from a huge list of wines and sherries, with the best of B.C. wines (from the province's Okanagan [OKA-uh-NOG-gin] region prominently featured). The four of us put ourselves in our sommerlier's hands, and she brought each of us three different portions of food, each accompanied by a pour. We sampled all twelve plates and wines around the table, and left with a lot of notes about future wine and sherry purchases.

We also went to Sun Sui Wah, a Chinese restaurant in the city's Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, at the suggestion of our friend Rick, a global foodie whose recommendations have never disappointed us. We pulled up in front of an unprepossessing restaurant at the corner of a long retail strip and climbed the curved stairs to the dining room, where we walked into the middle of a 200-person Chinese wedding just as the bride and groom were posing for photos. We were led into a second huge dining room in the front of the restaurant, where the four of us were among the less than ten non-Asians in the room (a promising sign). Sun Sui Wah is best known for its roasted squab (a photo of one of them, roasted and head-on, sat prominently on a card like this on our table, causing some in our party initial trepidation)

and for huge Alaska king crab. We ordered both, starting with the pigeon - mercifully, and as a likely concession to our Western tastes, the squab had already been quartered, and its head retained in the kitchen rather than brought to table. It was dark, livery, and quite tasty. While we pulled at the bird, the head waiter stepped forward with our Alaska crab in a Tupperware tub - he grabbed it and held it up - "About six pounds, OK?" The crab looked energetic, so we approved, and within a few minutes it arrived steamed in garlic and cracked.


The University of British Columbia: This school has an almost unimaginably beautiful setting, occupying a huge backwards "D" at the end of the Kitsilano neighborhood in lower Vancouver. The on-campus Museum of Anthropology (MOA), about a quarter-century old, is a lovely concrete and glass exhibit space well suited to showing the totem poles, bentwood boxes, and food bowls of the First Nation peoples of BC, along with a remarkable permanent exhibit of European ceramics from the 18th-20th centuries and temporary exhibits that currently include photodocumentation of Samoan tattoos. Like seemingly everything else in Vancouver in these pre-Winter Olympic months, the MOA is currently undergoing renovation and expansion. After a pleasant lunch at the campus' Sage Bistro (UBC does seem unusually open to off-campus visitors), housed in an attractive concrete building that put me in mind of the Aspen Institute campus, we visited the Arboretum, a beautiful patch of BC evergreen forest and plantings from around the globe that now features a 1000-meter canopy walk atop a series of suspension bridges installed by Greenheart Canopy Walks, which claims to have pioneered this uniquely tree-friendly system of cables ("tree huggers"), poles ("tree kissers"), and Lego-like platforms that were remarkably stable and with high enough sides even for a tall guy like me.

The Waterfront: From our room and our hotel pool, we spent a lot of time just staring at the mountains across Burrard Inlet while, directly in front of us, an aeroaqua ballet of cruise ships, freighters, ferries, helicopters, floatplanes, fishing boats, kayaks, houseboats and other craft floated and flew in every direction. We took several long walks along the seawall, passing the residential towers of Coal Harbour (and wandering through some beautifully landscaped complexes like the Waterfront Residences at Bayshore), walking all the way out to the totem poles of Stanley Park and back.

Vancouver's attractions have us positing what life might be like in one of those highrises, or one of the numerous stepback midrises with large terrace gardens, or even in a houseboat. Photos from some of our tourists stops can be found here.