The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards have been variously described as the cookbook Olympics or “a sort of Nobel prize for cookery writers.” As if James Walt hasn’t enough accolades in his apron, he gears up for the Winter Olympic season with his newly released Araxi: Seasonal Recipes from the Celebrated Whistler Restaurant having just won…
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Araxi offers up high-class gastroporn
I can’t read cookbooks. I’m illiterate when it comes to technical directions. But Araxi: Seasonal Recipes from the Celebrated Whistler Restaurant currently has pride of place on my bedside table. Call it high-class gastroporn. I interviewed Araxi’s Executive Chef, James Walt, a few years ago for a series of Chef Profiles that ran in Whistler…
Best Places to Tie The Knot
I got married at twenty. It was spur of the moment, and we really didn’t care about the details. Flowers, rings, fuss, whatever. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything worse than having a room full of people scrutinising me while I tried to fake them out that I was really a princess. But now…
Imagineery Ski-bums
Mike Douglas features in On the Shoulders of Giants, Whistler Blackcomb’s new documentary about the PEAK 2 PEAK gondola. When we developed the script for the story of the Peak 2 Peak gondola, director Jim Budge and I knew we wanted to place the new gondola in the context of Whistler’s long history of attracting…
Quit Work Now
My husband bought me a tshirt that says, “Work is forever. Snow isn’t.” Manifestees are a fashion staple in ski towns, and The Escape Route’s “Quit work, buy some stuff, go somewhere, have some fun” is an ethos the store has been promoting for 20 years. When I talked to owner, Jayson Faulkner, about the store’s 20…
Did the world owe Sarajevo?
For Kootenay Mountain Culture’s Winter 2009 “Competition” issue, I investigated what an Olympic hangover looks like at altitude. Now, with just 78 days until the Winter Olympics rolls into Whistler, it seems fitting to look at what previous host mountain communities have gotten for their hospitality. Anyone who’s ever hosted a wicked party knows the…
1500 words on Whistler: ready, set, go!
How you do write the story of Whistler, in 1500 words of less? Given the chance to write the Whistler feature for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Souvenir Program, the only option was to offer readers a bullet-train journey across well-travelled ground, slowing occasionally to wave at contemporary Whistlerites, which gave rockstar-photojournalist Bonny Makarewicz a platform…
Road time and river time explains sense of duelling personalities
Pemberton’s Multifaith Messiah, scribe and The Pembertonian columnist Babar Javed quotes Margaret Vasser in one of his recent baubles of wisdom. “There are two kinds of time. Road time is when we are standing at the roadside, with events approaching and then passing us by; river time is when we are in the flow of…
Not a bedroom community, not a potato farm
My husband is barely out the door five minutes when the phone rings. “Are you calling to make sure I didn’t just go back to bed?” I ask. I am a writer. Such things do happen. It’s not as if I need to punch the clock at 8am to get my work done. “No. I…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 