John Bishop

There are three famous men born in Shrewsbury, Charles Darwin, Brother Cadfael and John Bishop.

Willoughby Blew

I met up with my friend, designer (many magazines including Vancouver Magazine and Maclean’s) and now artist Chris Dahl yesterday at a Vietnamese soup place on Broadway and MacDonald. Dahl now lives in Qualicum Beach. He told me how upset he gets when he comes to Vancouver to see buildings and places he knew that are now gone.

I could have told him, since I am a lot older than he is, that thinking about stuff from the past (family, old friends, former girlfriends) is an ever constant endeavour.

While I have dined a few times at Bishop’s on 4^th Avenue I recall one very important one when I took my 13 year-old granddaughter Rebecca for dinner there. I called ahead and told them to bring the food the table with as much ceremony as possible. This they did covering all dishes with lovely silver covers and the unveling as if a white rabbit would be underneath.

What made the evening even more special is that our friend, animator Marv Newland was dining there with his girlfriend. We exchanged comments on our food across the aisle.

But there was one more event that I am sure my Rebecca will not ever forget. We were invited by John Bishop to inspect his kitchen.

I have no idea if anybody has ever said or written this: “A restaurant is as good as its kitchen.”

My former editor at Vancouver Magazine, and friend, Malcolm Parry calls life experience as being twofold. You can look up at heights and we know anybody can do that. Or you can look down and only the privileged do that. He thus has this idea about The Privileged Position. In my view being invited by John Bishop to inspect his kitchen is not something that is the usual for most.

The outstanding reality about Bishop’s is that the kitchen, while neat as a pin, is not big in the least. I can almost imagine what it must be like in it during a busy evening at the restaurant.

For me a kitchen is something that is embedded in my memory. All the kitchens of my past are there to be brought out again with no notice.

The first one I can remember was on Melián in Coghlan in Buenos Aires. It was there where my father told me, “Alexander, if you do not know how to make sauces you will never be a good cook.” I learned.

It was also in that kitchen, in a damp and cold house with no heating that one could feel warm if the oven door of the big iron stove were left open. My father in those cold winter nights had a frequent visitor. He was writer Julio Cortázar. Our housekeeper, Mercedes Basaldúa would slowly whip Nescafé with a spoon and carefully measured water drops to make what almost resembled a cappuccino. My father would then offer Cortázar one of his Player’s Cigarettes but Cortázar would point out he didn’t like English tobacco. Cortázar, with a voice I have never forgotten, would send me (I was 8) to the corner store owned by Don Pascual to buy him the Argentine Arizonas.

There were many more kitchens in my life but there is one that I will never forget because of what happened in it. It was in Arboledas, Estado de México. Rosemary and I arrived one day and were told my our housekeeper that our eldest daughter (5 or 6) had opened a bottle of Carbona upholstery cleaner under the sink and taken a swig. I put Ale in the tub and poured cold water on her face. I took her to a doctor around the corner who pumped her stomach and thus saved her.

That Bishops is closing soon brings for me the grief of living in a place that if I were a migrating Canada Goose I would not recognize from the air. When I drive around town I can instantly feel the three previous locations of Vancouver Magazine for which I worked for so many years. The fibreglass replicas of the lovely women on the corners of the former Georgia Dental/Medical Building cannot in any way represent the building now there.

I cannot look at the semi-abandoned Dal Grauer Substation on Burrard without thinking of that architect’s architect, Ned Pratt who dispatched a young man to the library to look up Mondrian. How many people in Vancouver know that the Substation in its glory days was a Mondrian?  

I have fond memories of eating at the CBC cafeteria inside the building (now hidden by neither here nor there towers) on Hamilton Street. I can remember staring at length the very large Shadbolt hanging from a wall.

In this city with such a poor memory who can remember having that wonderful Easter buffet at the William Tell?

But there is one other memory about Bishops that is seared in my brain. I wrote about it here. I will reprise it by explaining that writer John Lekich had interviewed Audrey Hepburn on that special day. Knowing that it was Canada Elections on that same day I invited Lekich to Bishop's knowing that the bill might be reduced by not being able to buy booze. We sat down and I notice a couple of men with wires in their ears.. I then saw a limousine stop and a man got out. He sat down with the two men. He looked at me and said, "How are you Alex?" It was John Turner.

A favourite restaurant to me is like a mother, my mother, when she was gone I regretted (and have until this day) not having told her how much I loved her.