Hawksworth dishes up festive feast for school kids
ANOTHER JOE: As well as serving his Hawksworth and Nightingale restaurants’ affluent diners, David Hawksworth squeezed in a catering gig at Britannia Secondary’s east Vancouver campus recently. There he delivered a Christmas turkey-and-trimmings meal to Streetfront Alternative Middle School teacher Trevor Stokes and the students he says “are worth investing in.” The event was staged by Vancouver Firefighters Charities members who partner with the non-mainstream school through the Sports for Kids program. As usual, Dotty Kanke and husband Bud were involved. That same day, the Joe Fortes restaurant that Bud founded in 1984 and sold in 2012 announced that it will launch a Whistler satellite in January. Perhaps the original Thurlow-off-robson joint’s 1948 Chrysler taxi will trundle up the Sea to Sky Highway to park outside the new one.
TIED TO BE FIT: Like apples, accomplished parents’ children reputedly land close to the tree. The moviebiz equivalent is not being left on the cutting-room floor. That’s the case with Amanda Giannakos, whose mother, Gabriela Schonbach, is partner-executive producer at city-based Omnifilm Entertainment. At that firm’s recent 40th anniversary celebration, marketing-distribution director Giannakos said she founded the independent but related NM Media Co. in April. Its first 25-episode series, Strong By NM, will air next fall on the One Get Fit channel. It presently carries Omnifilm’s Namaste Yoga series that former lawyer Giannakos heads. Early-morning one-minute handstands may have concentrated (or frazzled) her brain to launch the 160-paper-page Movement by NM magazine that “explores the intersection of art, fitness and everyday life.”
DAMN RIGHT: Odlum Brown portfolio manager Martin Mcnish and others gave charity giving a new twist in 2016 by spark-plugging the Give A Damn program. At quarterly events, 20s-to-40s-aged members each put up $100 and vote on pitches by three charities’ representatives. In the Yaletown’s Earls loft recently, Fresh Roots (freshroots.ca) executive director Marc Schutzbank, 32, received a $13,000 pot swelled by attendees and Mcnish’s friend Martin Jones, the San Jose Sharks goaltender. Schutzbank, whose wife Ilana Labow co-founded Fresh Roots in 2009, said elementary and secondary students grow food at educational farms on several plots on school grounds, learn to cook it and see it go to cafeterias, food access programs and the like. “When kids are outside and growing something, they also find success in the classroom, and their confidence increases,” said U.s.-native Schutzbank who came to UBC in 2010 on a Fulbright scholarship. “If they grow it, they will eat it,” he said of Fresh Roots students. Canada, he added, “is the only G7 nation without a federal school-meals program.” He and Labow have a first and presumably healthy-eating child due Jan. 11.
A TOAST: To furniture maker Kate Duncan, who launched her ever-growing annual Address show of talented young designer-artisans in 2015. Having gained a solid reputation, she’ll present 12 artisans during Toronto’s Designto festival Jan. 14-19.
ABOUT TIME: Another fourth-decade landmark restaurant, Bridges, is due for a $15-million renovation. So said George Frankel, who built the Granville Island waterfront facility and, with son Daniel, bought out his surviving partners in 2018. A building permit arrived this week. Beginning in fall 2020, work will involve wraparound terraces on both floors. Daniel, who runs the family firm today, also owns all three Tap & Barrel pub-restaurants and Brewhall, the former Steel Toad Brewery. At the Omega boutique’s recent annual reception, Frankel pere greeted Matteo Escoto, 9, who appeared in past columns modelling the Swiss firm’s wristwatches. Frankel wore a competing Rolex Oyster that was a gift from Daniel but vowed to reciprocate with a like-value Omega.
DAY’S AHEAD: Victoria-born former logger David Day has written and helped provide paper for more books than many have read: 50 and counting. His Tolkien Bestiary sold a million copies. His Doomsday Book of Animals, with a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh, sold 750,000. Pal Terry Jones, the Monty Python’s Flying Circus team member, wrote the introduction for his Decoding Wonderland. Three more in Day’s Tolkien series were released recently in North America, the U.K. and France. With wife Roisin, the expatriate will soon occupy a former Day family home in Victoria.
HI-YO SILVER: Further up-island, Qualicum Beach’s Ceramics Artworks firm owner Chris Dahl has released the Silver Dagger title track of a self-produced world-fusion album titled Smoke + Shadows. Artist Dahl drummed with the My Indole Ring band that had its self-titled 1969 album reissued 41 years later by a producer in then-psychedelia-crazy Germany.
AFTER TATS: Vince Hemingson pinpointed communities in Borneo,
California, China, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, Russia, Samoa, and other locales for a documentary titled The Vanishing Tattoo (vanishingtattoo.com). No cutaneous embroidery appears on the female subjects of his Nude In The Landscape photographs exhibited at 1725 West Third to Dec. 31, along with others of Asian locales and African wildlife.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: All bluster aside, modern-day “witch hunts” may actually identify witchcraft.