Take a Tour of BC's Bountiful Regions

After winding some 1,375 kilometres from the Rocky Mountains, the Fraser River spills into the Strait of Georgia through a wide, fertile delta that is home to fruit, vegetable, and dairy farms, as well as most of the province’s population. With so much abundance on its doorstep, it’s little wonder that Vancouver, BC’s biggest city, has become a leader in “locavorism”.

Andrea Carlson, chef-owner of the hyper-local Burdock & Co. on Main Street, is one true believer.

“The landscape inspires me through its proximity to the ocean and its mild coastal environment.”

Carlson is also the creator of the first 100-mile restaurant menu back in 2006 at Raincity Grill, and has long been finding poetry in local ingredients: “A backdrop of coastal forests exhale the fragrance of spruce and fir whose tips we harvest for our use. Wild Nootka roses baking in sunlight perfume the air and inspire us to blend them with honeys. Beyond the rosebushes, the ocean spray is alive with brine and iodine that sparks a taste for seaweeds and gifts from the sea.”

It is these gifts from nature that make their way to restaurant menus across the city, like the sustainable sushi at Miku, the buttery sablefish at upscale Bluewater Café, and the crisply battered cod ‘n’ chips at casual Popina Canteen at Granville Island. These gifts also have fuelled the city’s growing number of vegetarian and vegan restaurants, including the more upscale The Acorn in Mount Pleasant.

This is a place where food grows wild. On long, narrow Vancouver Island and the archipelagos scattered between its rocky coastline and the mainland, the climate is so mild and warm, the soil so lush and fertile, that everything grows here, from Pinot Noir and olives to citrus fruits and tea. It’s no wonder local chefs like Jesse McLeery of Pilgrimme on Galiano Island or Nick Nutting at Tofino’s Wolf in the Fog spend almost as much time foraging in the woods and on the beach as they spend in the kitchen.

Just down the road from Tofino, in Ucluelet, the remote village on the rocky peninsula that juts into Barkley Sound, Pluvio chef Warren Barr hunts for cynamoka berries, mushrooms, seaweeds, spruce tips, and Nootka roses—being careful, of course, to do it sustainably so as not to damage the sensitive ecology of the place. He captures the essence of his community in dishes like albacore tuna tartare “served on a big, gnarly cracker that feels like the coastline here” or wild blackberries transformed into vinegar that adds local flavour to salads all year long.

“We want to make sure that the food we’re creating is food from here. It’s appropriate to the West Coast, and appropriate to Ucluelet.”

Both the Thompson and Okanagan valleys were created, in part, by glacial activity that left behind fertile soils, unique terroir, and two very different culinary scenes in this most diverse of regions. (It’s also the first destination in North America to receive the sustainable tourism certification from Biosphere International and the Responsible Tourism Institute.)

The Thompson is a place of cattle ranches, grasslands, and trout-filled lakes, as well as a thriving Indigenous culture that culminates each year in the Kamloopa Powwow, a spectacular celebration of the Secwepemc people’s heritage in storytelling, song, and dance in traditional regalia. The Okanagan is orchard, beach, and wine country, where two-thirds of the province’s 326 licensed grape wineries can be found, and 84% of its vineyard land.

But there’s also much more than Riesling and Syrah here, which is why so many talented chefs are moving to the region. Foragers appear at the kitchen door with wild asparagus and porcini mushrooms. Farmers show up with crates of tomatoes, peppers, plums, melons, cherries, and apples, some twenty varieties of them. There are honey producers and cheesemakers, a farmer who grows oyster mushrooms, and another who raises char in his tanks in Oliver.

“Even with winter, you’re still getting fresh vegetables,” says Murray MacDonald, executive chef at The Bear, the Fish, the Root & the Berry, the Indigenous-inspired restaurant at Spirit Ridge Resort in Osoyoos.

“What the farmers bring in just blows my mind.”

Mostly, though, MacDonald tries to use what’s indigenous to both the land and the culture of the people who’ve lived here for thousands of years. “Just down on the lakeside there are berries and spruce tips and wild rosehips right now for rosehip jam. Coming here, I get this really positive, happy, spiritual energy.”

The province’s north is a vast and wild land, (for scale, think larger than California), that sweeps from the Haida Gwaii archipelago in the west to the grain and cattle farms of the Peace River Valley in the east, and from the Yukon/Alaska border to the north and the city of Prince George in the south.

For millennia, Indigenous peoples have lived in the north’s glaciated valleys, towering mountain ranges, and mist-shrouded coastline, cooking with what the land and sea provide. Visitors hungry for a taste of their traditions can make their way to Skidegate on Haida Gwaii, where chef Keenawaii (Roberta Olson) welcomes guests into her home to enjoy traditional Haida foods like sguu (dried seaweed), K’aaw (herring eggs on kelp), smoked salmon, venison, and wild berries.

The mountainous southeastern corner of British Columbia is a land of adventure, and that applies as much to dining as it does to hiking, skiing, and biking those towering peaks.

Between the four mountain ranges lie crystalline lakes and fertile valleys that grow sweet fruits (and a certain other, not-so-secret-anymore cash crop), and have been both a place of refuge (for Doukhobours and draft dodgers) and internment (for Japanese Canadians during the Second World War).

The region’s history, combined with its wild remoteness, have made it a place of compassion (which is why so many communities have made food security part of their mandate), with a welcoming attitude to new ideas, flavours, and cuisines.

From the misty fjords of the Great Bear Rainforest to the golden plateaus of ranch lands, and from and the Gold Rush Trail to the jagged peaks of the Cariboo Mountains, this is wild country. Waters are rich with trout and salmon, fields with cattle and grain, forests with berries, mushrooms, spruce tips, and birch syrup.

Small mining towns still dot the historic route followed by Gold Rush prospectors in the 1860s, and cattle ranches sprawl across the grasslands surrounding them. Cowboys and stampedes are still a proud tradition here. Guest ranches offer city slickers a tranquil escape from the busyness of daily life, where the clean air of the open range nourishes the soul, and the body is fed by wholesome meals flavoured by wild ingredients.