Sorry, But I Ate the West Coast - Part One - Following the Mouths of the Famous

  Somehow, some people have managed to become famous by eating. I don't mean speed eating or over eating to the point where you become the world's biggest person, just normal eating and telling people how much you like it. As far as I know being able to open your mouth and shove something edible into it and then say "Yum!" isn't on any university curriculum but it should be. Just turn on your TV and there will be some sort of "food channel" where people make a very fine living making things and going yum. There are even shows about people who don't even make their own stuff - they just go around eating other people's stuff and going yum. Sitting at home you can't even smell it yet alone be able to tell if that yum is genuine. I wanted to be the Yum Meister so I decided to follow in the foot steps and the mouths of the famous.
 One of the more popular food programmes is Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri on the Food Network. One of the most famous places to eat in North Vancouver is The Tomahawk. It was just a matter of time before the two got together. If you missed the episode you can easily catch up on it on Youtube. If you do, you will get to hear Guy go gaga over Yorkshire pudding, beef dip and gravy. That's fine but you will notice that he is eating in the kitchen with the chef, and that's not the typical dining experience for most people.

 First, you have to get in. They have a parking lot, but not huge. We got the last two spaces. Once inside the door be prepared to wait. A lot. We were told one wait time but it got supersized.  There is a trick to the waiting period that we learned by, well, waiting around. It seems that they seat groups as whole groups so if you ask for a table for six you get to watch while three tables of two get seated before you. One woman in charge of a group who had been waiting for quite a long time before we even got there asked for her group to be split up so that they could get seated. The woman who was in charge of taking your name, handling the check out, selling the souvenirs  and pretending to be interested when the 87th customer in a row mentioned that they had seen the Guy Fieri review,  was adamant that once they had been given the whole group number they were going to be seated as a group. We got in before they did.
 While you are waiting for a server you can spend your time being bedazzled by a homemade museum. It is festooned with everything related to aboriginal culture. Most of it seems to be genuine fine quality artifact and art, some of it seems to be more kitsch than culture,  and there are even a fair number of items that seem to feature racist caricatures that in other establishments would have been removed by the politically correct police some time ago. The latter category may be why you aren't allow to take pictures.  Regulars, I gather, love it and don't want anything changed. Newbies can make up their own minds.
 Now for the food. Mr Fieri had already covered the supper stuff and although it was pushing noon we opted to go for the breakfast menu.  Marg, our Vancouver friend (and guide to this experience), said that there was no choice, I had to have the Yukon.  Straight forward enough but apparently there was an upsell option concerning the type of eggs that I could choose. I find this vexing. If it wasn't for Marg I would have gone through enough consternation just sussing out the main choices, now it seemed that I had to pass some sort of moral ethical test concerning the environmental genesis of my chicken embryo. I think that a regular egg means that mom was kept in a cage and fed some sort of chicken food which may or may not have been good for me. The term free range gives me this picture of the chicken mom scratching in some dirt and eating the occasional grasshopper as well as some sort of chicken feed that may or may not be good for me. Organic means that mom might be in a cage but she gets fed something certified to some standard that it is to some specific degree chemical and pesticide free. Nice to have choices but that's a lot of decision making about something that comes out of a chicken's bum when I haven't even had my coffee yet. 
   My meal consisted of huge amounts of Yukon bacon over fried eggs over toast over a large helping of home fried hash brown potatoes. I'm not really too sure what Yukon bacon is as it looks like regular bacon mated with back bacon, fried to very well done. As my wife, Jan, is not a bacon person, she went for the french toast. Four big slabs and maple syrup. She managed to mumble out a "very good" between forkfuls. I am usually suspicious when I see large quantities of food offered. Often volume means poor quality but luckily that's not the case here. Just good food and lots of it.
 While you are lining up to pay at the counter you can peruse the souvenirs such as they are. If you neglected to wear your colourful cardboard feathered headdress while eating you can pick one up for the next time you need an outfit to wear to work on "Casual Fridays". You might even cheap out and scoop a couple of placemats -they have a cartoon drawing of Canada and say "Keep Smiling", so they can be used for all occasions. If you are into more upscale mementos you could go for the t shirts that say, "KEEP SMILING" or the ever adorable yellow rubber duckie with the painted feather headband that also in block letters announces "KEEP SMILING". Like the eggs, its your choice.
 Well I don't have a nifty car like Guy to drive off in to end the review but if any of his camera crew reads this I'm ready for my line and close up on 1...2....3    "Yum!"  Ken