Food, cooking guide highlights neighbourhoods

The Gastown Foodie

By Brad Hill and Chris Dagenais Brad Hill Imaging, $44.95

For Brad Hill, the decision to create a cookbook was as much about personal discovery as it was about growing his business.

He had already amassed a lengthy background in food and restaurant photography by the time he had moved to Vancouver three and a half years ago to be closer to his wife’s family, so the book idea wasn’t too much of a stretch. But what he really wanted from the endeavour was something slightly more filling. Literally.

He wanted to know where to eat in his new home city.

So, he dived into the local food scene — dining at almost every restaurant in his area, and slowly compiling a list of his favourite haunts and dishes.

“It sounds really low-tech, but the first step is I literally got on to Google Maps and I started pinning anything that looked like even a vague fit for a restaurant,” he says of the process. “I come up with a long list of restaurants, and then, through a combination of speaking with people and a lot of further research online, I’d go and shorten that list down.”

And then, he dined. On his own dime, of course.

“I’d go and eat at all the restaurants and familiarize myself with all the particular styles, from my point of view,” he says. “I want to be sure I actually like what they do.” From there, Hill edited the list down even further and then started approaching the chosen restaurants and chefs with his book plans.

“It was a really great way to get to know the new city,” he explains of the lengthy process. “To get out and about and introduce myself to restaurateurs.”

What resulted, was a highly curated list of 35-odd restaurant suggestions, profiles and recipes for the chosen neighbourhood.

“There isn’t a restaurant in these books that I wouldn’t recommend someone go to,” he says of the eateries highlighted in The Foodie cookbook collection. “The idea of the book is you can work out what situations, events or when is a good time to go.”

Basically, the books are as much a restaurant guide to their respective neighbourhoods as they are a how-to cooking guide.

“What I try to make these books focus on, is the why of a restaurant,” he explains. “Why does that restaurant exist? Why is it important to that neighbourhood? Why is what they’re doing making them unique or different?”

Hill created his first book in the growing cookbook series in 2015, highlighting notable eateries on the North Shore.

“It just sort of happened that the North Shore was just sort of ripe for The North Shore Foodie book because I feel the North Shore was overlooked a little bit,” he explains of the first cookbook tome, released in November 2015.

“That gave me the confidence to know that the product I was putting together was desired by the restaurants.”

He followed the initial release with an East Van Foodie book in 2016.

After struggling to shoulder all the work for The North Shore Foodie cookbook, Hill enlisted the help of North Shore News food writer Chris Dagenais, who wrote the forward for the first book, the East Van tome, and the latest Gastown edition.

“He knows so much more about food than I do,” Hill says. “And obviously way more about the Vancouver food industry because he has lived here for forever.”

Hill and Dagenais celebrated the release of the third book in the Foodie collection last month — although he assures those who may get hung up on the term “foodie” that the books aren’t purely for frou-frou, highbrow diners who like to debate the finer elements of a true artisan cheese.

“I think of it as an inclusive term — basically anyone who is interested in food,” he says with a laugh. “I’m not the foodie.”

Instead, Hill says it’s the readers themselves — and the restaurants that are featured in the books — who truly earn the foodie moniker.

Hill says he’s now in the process of deciding the next neighbourhood to highlight in the series.

“Should I do a Yaletown Foodie? Are there enough places there to justify it? Or should I include Downtown and Granville Island?” he says. “Should I call it The West Side Foodie? But, if I do the West Side Foodie, it will be a massive area. And will that be such a bad thing? Should I do a 400-page book?”

Sounds like Hill has a lot of work ahead of him.

“It’s a big job,” he says of the process. “But it’s easy to do when you’re doing something you love.”

And the good food helps a little bit, too.