The Soft Sando Sessions

This project is one long in the works. It is dedicated to my friend Andrew Morrison, co-founder of Scout Magazine, who passed away in 2021.

We talked at length about the scope and endless connections among people, places and restaurants all over the country. Each of us had worked on both sides of Canada before moving our careers and families to the West Coast. Having had professional lives in each place, we realized the many interconnections within our community here. Andrew started documenting restaurants as they came and went in Vancouver - never wanting to forget the great rooms of the city as their successes ebbed and flowed over time. His version for Scout Magazine was titled “Restaurant Graveyard.”

I had started my own version of this map of restaurant people out of necessity at the winery, tracking Vancouver and Vancouver Island’s owners, wine buyers, chefs and somms as I ran my own sales agency, taking my core winemaking team out on the street with me to do seasonal sales runs. It was very important to me that my staff (not all of them originally from British Columbia either) knew who had worked for whom, and when, and the nature of their food and wine pedigree. Knowing who you were talking with during a sales call is essential to good saleswomanship. These notes formed a family-tree-like structure that was posted casually in the staff office for everyone to familiarize themselves with. These interconnections were at the heart of our agency, but also in my heart when I was making wine for my restaurant community over the course of two decades.

It is my opinion that this culinary history of the West Coast is oral. No one has really bothered to write it down. I think that our cuisine is still so new in its essence that everyone has been too busy just “doing” to stop and articulate an ethos, an origin story or a catalogue of local ingredients that drive what is created on the West Coast of Canada. This attitude is very West Coast. The ability to “go west” and find far more bountiful opportunities is the very reason that drew many here in the first place. As a young cook in the 90s, in a competitive and pedigreed city like Toronto and Montreal, this certainly was my own circumstance. Being too busy, and brushing aside an ego in the name of doing rather than articulating what you are doing, is also a very West Coast way of being.

I don’t want this to be my story, however. Or even my point of view on it. That is a story for another time. I want this project to be told in my community’s own words.

The Soft Sando Sessions are intended as a compendium of interviews about the training, connections and contributions that have made this city Good at Lunch. Its history is too rich and important not to be written down.

I had the idea for this project while trying (unsuccessfully) to write down my own story last winter. It was a rainy day, I had picked up a mortadella sandwich from the deli at La Quercia (the softest sando of all time made on their cloud-like ciabatta - if you know, you know …) and fixed myself a Campari soda. I decided that in advance of writing down my own memoir, it would be more important to get this history down first. To finish the conversation Andrew and I started. It was at that moment I knew I would invite my favourite people from the business into my home to share a soft sando, a stiff drink and some candid stories. My job is to write them down and connect the branches of the beautiful tree of our food community in British Columbia.

I will share them with you here.

- Heidi