i have spent the last few days at ubc subsisting on iced americanos, iced unsweetened black tea, avocado rolls, inari, and cucumber rolls in the ubc village, where 2 sushi places are across from the starbucks.
Vancouver's food obsessions
Sometimes it seems like we're overrun with Starbucks and sushi. How did we get that way -- and which one rules?
by Chad Skelton, Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Hidekazu Tojo, Vancouver's leading sushi chef and owner of Tojo's restaurant on West Broadway, goes back to Japan at least once a year. He has no doubt that people in Vancouver eat more sushi than anywhere else in North America.
But he thinks the city's sushi obsession is even bigger than that. Vancouver, he said, has become the sushi capital of the world.
"Vancouverites eat more sushi than Japanese people," he said.
Tojo is credited by many, including himself, with an innovation that turned sushi from an obscure ethnic food to mainstream fare: the inside-out roll. Traditional Japanese sushi is wrapped in nori -- thin seaweed paper -- with the rice and seafood inside. Tojo said he realized in the early 1970s that the nori was turning many white customers off sushi. "People hated sushi at that time [because] it looked like black paper," he said. "So I hid it." Tojo put the nori on the inside of the roll, wrapping the rice and filling around the outside -- the form used for most of the most popular rolls now, such as California rolls.
"When I did it inside out ... then it became very popular," he said. Tojo is also credited with inventing the B.C. Roll -- with barbequed salmon skin and cucumber -- one of the most popular rolls in the city.
When it comes to Vancouver's food obsessions, it's hard to compete with sushi. But right after our B.C. rolls, sashimi and bento boxes, there are few things Vancouverites love more than our tall lattes, espresso shots and Frappuccinos.
Vancouver's first Starbucks opened in 1987 in a small kiosk in the SeaBus terminal on Cordova. It was the first Starbucks outside of Seattle and only the ninth Starbucks ever. There are now more than 7,800 Starbucks in 34 countries.
So, of our twin obsessions, which one wins out? Which are there more of in our city: Sushi or Starbucks? Figuring that out is not an easy task.
While Starbucks knows how many stores it has in the Lower Mainland -- 121 -- no one keeps track of how many sushi restaurants there are. However, according to business listings, there are 175 restaurants in the Lower Mainland with the word "sushi" in their name -- from Ajisai Sushi Bar on West 42nd to Zero One Sushi on Bute. Another 138 restaurants have the word "Japanese" in their name. That works out to, at minimum, 313 sushi restaurants in the region -- more than twice the number of Starbucks and, incidentally, more than three times the number of McDonald's (99).
In the downtown core alone, there are more than 50 sushi restaurants (see map). And both Starbucks and sushi continue to grow. Starbucks has opened 11 new Vancouver outlets in just the past year alone. And sushi restaurants keep on popping up across the city. For years, one block of Davie Street, from Thurlow to Bute, contained four sushi restaurants. Last fall, a longtime Korean restaurant in the same block closed down and reopened weeks later -- as the block's fifth sushi spot.
Will Vancouver reach a point where it cannot sustain any more Starbucks or sushi outlets? Is there a limit to how much caffeine and sticky rice we can consume? Tojo, for one, thinks Vancouver is reaching a sushi saturation point. "I think it's enough now," he said. As for Starbucks, Monachello said he can't say at what point Vancouver will have enough of them. "I don't think I could speculate where the limits are," he said.
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