STANLEY PARK
by Timothy Taylor
An uneven but tasty debut about a Vancouver chef who turns guerrilla prankster while trying to reconnect with his slightly mad anthropologist father.
Jeremy Papier chose his colors in cooking school, a place he saw as being divided between Crips and Bloods. Jeremy can’t stand the Crips, who “tended to stack things like mahi-mahi and grilled eggplant in wobbly towers glued together with wasabi mayonnaise,” while being a Blood means being linked to tradition but not beholden to it. Jeremy has come from France to start up his own bistro in Vancouver. Reasonably successful, the place still isn’t doing as well as it should, and the badly straitened Jeremy is also indebted to the ludicrous corporate-caricature Dante Beale for a quarter-million. Meanwhile, his anthropologist father—who practices a brand of immersive research that involves living in Stanley Park with the homeless tribes he’s writing about—seems to be sliding further down a slippery mental slope. As Jeremy is forced into ever-more desperate schemes to stay afloat, he feels a kinship with his father, whose research about connections to the land mirrors his own desires to cook with local ingredients. Hovering like a shark is Dante, who calls in his debt from Jeremy, forcing him into a partnership in a pretentious Crip palace. Dante is horrifying to Jeremy partly because he runs a chain of popular coffeehouses called (of course) Inferno, offending Jeremy’s senses to the core. Award-winning storywriter Taylor (whose first collection will be published in fall 2002) is obviously also offended, and his passion for the original and non-co-opted provides his tale both with its passion and its worst elements: Dante’s latte lairs are weak satire at best, and the subplot about Jeremy’s father never quite gels—both distracting from Taylor’s delightful depictions of Jeremy’s culinary creations.
Still, the reader is plunged right into the steamy excitement of a great restaurant going at full throttle, creating a serious craving, say, for Jeremy’s grilled lime-marinated sockeye salmon.