Hot dogs, ice cream, and, uh, hot dogs
by Don Genova
Some cities have crepes and burritos. We get hot dogs!
I’ve been trying to figure out why we don’t have a good street-food scene in Vancouver. Our leading lights like to refer to this place as a “world-class city,” but when it comes to the street-food scene, we can’t compare to real world-class cities.
Now let me see. I’ve had deep-fried octopus balls in Tokyo, fiery spiced cashews in Mumbai, tamales in Puerto Vallarta, empanadas in Santiago, Chile, crepes in Paris. Earlier this fall, I spent some time in Portland, Oregon, just a one-hour plane ride away, and saw downtown parking lots lined with little vans and trailers offering french fries, hamburgers, Thai food, crepes, vegan and vegetarian dishes, rice bowls, burritos, tacos, Philly cheese-steaks, and Hawaiian plate lunches! In Vancouver, I’ve had hot dogs, and ice cream, and, uh, hot dogs.
Portland is a city that reminds me very much of Vancouver: ethnic diversity, port city, residents who have a keen interest in food. At the Saturday farmers’ market, there was a mobile wood-burning oven where a lanky young guy was cranking out pizzas and another stall where a grey-haired, beer-bellied entrepreneur was turning a grated metal drum, roasting chili peppers over a propane flame so you could make your own Mexican dishes with less muss and fuss. There were even vendors selling bottles of wine, which would practically be considered anarchy in our fair city.
There is one exception to the dearth of street food in Vancouver and that’s at Wreck Beach, where city bylaws are not so strictly enforced, although I admit I would like the people selling me food there to have at least a scrap of fabric covering their nether regions.
I spent more than a few minutes on the Internet, navigating through the City of Vancouver’s Mobile Vending Bylaw, especially the mobile food-vending subsection. It gave me a headache. Here’s why:
• You have to get a criminal-record check every year you want to operate a mobile food-vending unit.
• You can’t operate your unit anywhere on the downtown peninsula west of Main Street.
• You can’t stop or set up unless you have customers, and once you serve all the customers in that batch, you have to move somewhere new.
• You can’t set up within 50 metres of any business that sells the same thing you do.
• Don’t even consider setting up by a beach, or a park, or a parking lot for a beach or a park.
• Forget about serving the bar crowd at closing time; you have to pack up by 11 p.m.
There are many more rules and regulations. Some of them even make sense, like not parking outside schools and not blaring music above a certain level while you’re trying to sell. Just be sure you turn off the music while you are selling. And make sure you have at least $2 million worth of liability insurance. With rules like these, no wonder we don’t have a thriving street-food scene. This is not a fun vending-food city.
Maybe I’m being a little harsh on the civic mothers and fathers entrusted with ensuring our health and well-being. But I’m not the only person who remembers an entire charitable function staffed by Vancouver’s top chefs almost being shut down because an overzealous health inspector deemed conditions weren’t meeting standards. And as a farmers’-market vendor at Trout Lake, I remember being chastised by that same inspector because I let people pick up cubes of bread to dip in my product with their bare fingers, instead of toothpicks. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to cut the bread at the market; I had to cut it all at home, as for some reason it’s not safe or sanitary to cut bread into pieces at a public market. I’m all for cleanliness, but maybe we wouldn’t get upset tummies so often these days if our guts were exposed to just a few bad bugs every now and then. Build up those immune systems!
So the rules may be responsible for the lack of a street-food scene in Vancouver, but I’m not totally against regulation. I talked to some of the vendors in Portland, who said they were fully licensed by the city, had to pass health inspections, have insurance, and so on. Maybe we need to be a little more encouraging. Maybe we need a little more imagination. It is happening right in our own backyard. Kudos to the City of Richmond for sanctioning an excellent outdoor food court at the spring and summer night markets there. (My favourites? Chicken “knees” and periwinkles in spicy black-bean sauce.) They took a chance, vendors are selling, and bellies are happy. Happy bellies mean happy people and a happy city—a “world-class” city.
Don Genova creates shows about food on CBC Radio One. His website is pacificpalate.com .
