SAM SIFTON ESSAY

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - This is a terrific place to eat. It is diverse and exciting in its culinary offerings.

A simple breakfast taken on the pier outside the Granville Island Public Market is an important stop for any wayfaring food pilgrim. The fish - ruddy and coldsmoked, a taste of British Columbia for centuries, best purchased at Longliner Seafoods in the main shed - is a sweet-sour-salty baseline from which we can measure the region’s best meals.

I was on the dock in late January, an advance man for the more than two million people organizers say will descend on Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, which run from February 12 to 28. While in the city and its suburbs, I was able to confirm earlier reconnaissance: Vancouver is among the best eating towns in the history of the Winter Games, partly because there are a lot of people cooking here.

Poised geographically and psychologically between Asia and Europe, running on reserves of Hong Kong cash and American corporate interests , Vancouver is what the novelist William Gibson, who lives here, calls “radically multicultural.” That is excellent for food.

So are good ingredients. And Vancouver has these in reserve: marvelous agricultural products from the rich land of the Fraser River valley to its east, and the bounty of the western sea.

The potlatch tradition of the Pacific Northwest, said Ed Pitoniak, a former hotel executive here , “owes a lot to the fact that this land- and seascape has always been rich in protein: shellfish, swimming fish, game, fowl.” The best food in Vancouver, he continued, comes out of that bounty. It comes from cooks, he said, who “want their foods to taste of this sea and those hills.”

In suburban Richmond the dim sum palaces are thriving, along with the strip-mall noodle huts and Chinese supermarkets, the tea parlors and barbecue joints. It would take weeks to negotiate them all.

The best place to start is where many finish: at Chen’s Shanghai. Chen’s is a charmless-looking little soup-dumpling shop in the middle of a mini-mall. But it serves terrific cold seaweed, thin, soft strips of kelp dressed in soy and black vinegar, with smashed garlic, and addictive cold steamed shrimp, spicy and sweet in their bright pink flesh.

It is for the restaurant’s steamed soup buns that most have come (and why the room is packed from well before the lunch hour until long after it ends).

The Pourhouse, a relatively new gastropub in the Gastown neighborhood, is a good place to have lunch - at least if you can bear the haggard souls outside on the street there hustling for cash. Within the Pourhouse you’ll find ling cod, and Humboldt squid, lots of local ingredients and gruff, serious preparations of same: liver pate, for instance .

Two of the best restaurants in Vancouver are also two of the longest- running.

First is Vij’s, an Indian restaurant that Vikram Vij opened in 1994. Vij’s is notable for its intricate regional interpretations of Indian food - grilled sablefish in a fiery mango reduction curry, for example - and for its all-female kitchen staff, as well as for its curiously non-maddening policy of taking no reservations (beer and free snacks help) .

Second is Tojo’s, as strange and marvelous a restaurant as has opened anywhere in the world and certainly one of its best sushi bars.

Hidekazu Tojo has been at this game since 1988, employing a style of cooking that is reminiscent both of the famed restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa’s elegant cross-cultural fare and of the kung-fu style known as drunken-master, in which a loose and casual form disguises phenomenal skill.

Those who visit the restaurant should demand a bar seat and ask Mr. Tojo to prepare what he wishes - omakase is the relevant Japanese term. Mr. Tojo watches his guests with care, and feeds them just up to the point of craziness. There might be king salmon and various snappers; saltwater eel; bright herring cut rough over rice. Another glass of sake.

No one has yet talked of how much any of this costs. Then a large bill arrives, almost $200 a person. It is worth every dime.


Vancouver offers plenty of dining options, including a special Celebration 2010 roll at Tojo’s. / PHOTOGRAPHS BY KIM STALLKNECHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES