Dear Editor,
My wife and I eat out a lot and when we have not been travelling or making an occasional visit to Downtown Vancouver, we have been content to stay in Steveston to enjoy the variety of cuisines that are available in our little town.
We could still use more variety — say a good deli where one could get traditional pastrami, Montreal smoked-meat, and corned-beef sandwiches on rye bread, another place like the one that was open for awhile behind the former Papi’s where you could get a real American-style hamburger, a Japadog-style establishment that would offer a variety of gourmet hot dogs, and an authentic French restaurant with upscale dishes, service, and wine list — but until recently our dining experiences in Steveston have been quite satisfying.
But in the last two years, four of the restaurants we had enjoyed and grown to trust over the years have either disappeared or changed ownership (same name and menu), and we are saddened by the fact that what has replaced them is quite simply disappointing.
We have been open to trying each of the replacement establishments and are quite capable of being objective in our comparisons and assessment (our son is a chef so we have had the luxury of a quite thorough education in cuisine-related characteristics and quality), but in each instance we came away feeling that we had not only experienced a significant diminution of quality in the related meals, but paid far more than we should have had to for what amounted to nothing more than mediocre food.
Change, especially in the volatile restaurant industry is inevitable, but the idea of change is to improve on what is being replaced, and if this trend of closures, new-ownerships, and sub-standard replacement offerings continues in the manner we are experiencing in Steveston, our dining options will be reduced to a fraction of what we have enjoyed over the last 25 years.
It doesn’t matter if you are serving hamburgers and fries, pancakes, or Confit de Canard — cook it with care, use quality ingredients, have great pride in what you are serving, and have us leave our dining experience feeling as if we had received full value for both our time and money.
But, be warned restaurateurs, if you don’t attend to these basic principles, then good luck staying in business for very long, because people like us will never become return customers — and it is return customers, or lack of them, that makes or breaks businesses.
Ray Arnold,
Richmond
