Chinese restaurants celebrate first awards

 
Top 24 signature dishes rated by panel of professional judges while online voters picked top restaurants
 
 
DISH AND CHIPS: CBC-TV show host Jaeny Baik and former city councillor B.C. Lee fronted the first Chinese Restaurant Awards ceremony -- www.chineserestaurantawards.com -- at Edgewater Casino Thursday. Among 10 categories, online voters named Sun Sui Wah best dim sum restaurant, and Mui Garden and Shanghai River best Cantonese and Northern. Professional judges top-rated many well-known restaurants for 24 signature dishes, but also cited Long's Noodle House on Main Street and West Broadway's Lin for most innovative and Shanghai dim sum respectively. To accompany dishes, especially Sun Sui Wah's winning lamb hot pot, Molson representative Aussie Jiwani nominated and served plenty of his employer's Singaporean Tiger lager.

BAD MEMORIES, GOOD ART: Her chic mien reflects Marie Khouri's years in Paris. Her ever-more-abstracted sculptures speak to one spent in the embattled one-time Paris of the Mediterranean, Beirut, where her father was assassinated. Motivated by that, her Surfacing exhibition opened Thursday at the Elliot Louis gallery, where an intruder shouted incomprehensibly about Gaza while tossing papers to simulate an explosion.

IN VINO: Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival executive director Harry Hertscheg smiled Tuesday as though he'd sampled all 18 B.C. wines at a reception in David Aisenstat's Shore Club reception to promote the March 23-29 running. It was because B.C. is this year's featured region, and there'll be a "grand slam" pouring of every vintage of "B.C.'s three most-sought-after wines: Black Hills Nota Bene, Mission Hills Oculus, and Osoyoos Larose Le Grand Vin."

Now the festival's three-year presenting sponsor, Aisenstat declined to cover his eyes for a tasting. "I never wear a blindfold when I'm wearing clothes," he said. That could mean an eyeful for business-class flyers when he naps en route to his 100-plus Keg steakhouses and other eateries.

CHEFS' SPECIAL: Eleven city chefs and assistants jammed Pino Posteraro's open and none-too-big Cioppino's restaurant kitchen to create the Senza Frontiere dinner recently. Feasting on nine-courses (plus dessert), each with accompanying wine, diners benefited the Chefs' Table Society's bursary and scholarship program. Calling the do La Senza Frontiere, with kitchen warriors wearing frilly undies rather than uniform whites, might make a little more room for them.

THANK YOU, MA'AM: Pacific Palisades hotel brass clearly expect results from sexologist Dr. Pega Ren's interactions with Zin restaurant diners Feb. 13 and 14. Those ordering Zin's $50 Valentine's Romance meals may also reserve hotel rooms priced from $29 -- per hour.

GEORGIA ON HIS MIND: Erection of the Hotel Georgia's 48-floor second tower has not flagged, said Delta Land Development president Bruce Langereis. The $300-million project's second construction crane goes up this week, he said.

AND THE WINNER IS: The Vancouver Film Critics Circle named Brightlight Pictures' Fifty Dead Men Walking best B.C. film when Terry David Mulligan emceed a Railway Club awards bash recently. Also nominated were Edison & Leo and Stone of Destiny. Congratulating Brightlight VP Jonathan Shore was talent agent-movie producer Carrie Wheeler, who has snagged a role in One Live Woman Walking. Walking the aisle, that is. She'll wed actor-director-writer Jaman Lloyd Feb. 7, and honeymoon on the French Riviera -- after the Cannes Film Festival, natch.

SERVICE CITED: Notary public Naib Singh Brar will leave soon for India, where he'll celebrate Republic Day and be one of 30 global recipients of the NRI Welfare Society's Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) award for community service and donations to scholarships, etc.

MOVING ON: Incoming U.S. president Barack Obama says he'll likely not authorize enquiries into the George W. Bush administration's more contentious programs. That echoes new British prime minister Winston Churchill who, with war raging in 1940, refused to review his predecessor's appeasement of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, " Churchill said, "we shall find we have lost the future."

With 1930s-like economics feared, Obama might also heed Churchill's "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away." Still, then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt sidestepped that in his 1933 inaugural address with: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

FOR BETTER: The day Roosevelt won a fourth U.S. presidential term, Dec. 7, 1944, B.C. attorney-general-to-be Alex Macdonald married Dorothy Lewis. Knowing her spouse's political interests, Dorothy asked if he planned to sit up that night for the returns. Catching the honeymoon spirit, he replied: "I'd rather turn in." Macdonald may remember that exchange during Dorothy's memorial service at St. James Anglican church this afternoon.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Trev Deeley Motorcycles Museum curator Terry Rea is exhibiting a near-century's-worth of British bikes at the Boundary-off-Broadway facility. You'll see AJS, BSA, Norton, Rudge, Triumph, Velocette, Vincent and many more models glistening in the lineup with -- the only unauthentic note -- no oil puddle in sight.