Michelin Adds Another Star in Vancouver

The Michelin man is in Vancouver again!

The 2024 Michelin Guide Vancouver results were announced this evening and some relatively not well known restaurants were given some prestigious nods.

Sushi Masuda only opened in March and just has six seats and was awarded a Michelin star, along with its chef-owner Yoji Masuda, who also won the Young Chef Award. It costs C$230 per person to eat there.

Masuda with his wife Akari (right)

The Vancouver-born Japanese chef only days away from turning 33 and he has many years of experience under his belt, having worked in Japan on and off; he moved back to Vancouver two years ago.

Now there are 10 one Michelin-starred restaurants in Vancouver, though no two stars yet. I had wondered if Le Crocodile by Rob Feenie would be included, as it's just been opened for six months, but some argue it's a rebrand of a restaurant so it doesn't count as a new one, whereas others think it deserves to be considered new.

Another under-the-radar restaurant that won the Bib Gourmand this year is Gary's on South Granville, which also won the Outstanding Service Award. It looks interesting, using local seasonal produce, a place to try next time -- if I can get a reservation.

The other awards were Exceptional Cocktail to Kissa Tanto, and Sommelier to AnnaLena. Interestingly no Green star was given out, which is supposed to recognise a restaurant that is in the forefront when it comes to sustainable practices. I heard Burdock & Co was bummed they didn't win the award.

All 10 one Michelin-starred restaurants on stage

Other than that last year's nine restaurants retained their one-star rating, though a handful dropped off the Recommended and Bib Gourmand lists. What's the difference between these two lists? According to Michelin, Bib Gourmand restaurants are those that "offer good quality food for a good value", and apparently are the anonymous inspectors' favourite places to dine on their own time; there isn't a particular description for the "Recommended" restaurants...

Some of the Chinese restaurants that were highlighted:

iDen and QuanJuDe Beijing Duck House (one star)

Seaport City Seafood Restaurant (Bib Gourmand)

Chef's Choice (Recommended)

Dynasty Seafood Restaurant (Recommended)

Neptune Palace Seafood Restaurant (Recommended) 

VIFF Review: Uncropped

A young Hamilton taking a picture with Salvador Dali

James Hamilton was studying art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and didn't know anything about photography when he became fashion photographer Alberto Rizzo's assistant.

But as Hamilton learned more about photography and got his first camera, he was hooked. He did lots of street photography and applied his knowledge of art in terms of composition to make his pictures. Hamilton was so fussy about his prints that he turned his kitchen into a darkroom and hung the negatives and prints to dry in the bathroom. 

Hitchcock revealing a jovial side of him

That's how he tells it in Uncropped, a fantastic documentary about him, the 40-year span of his career as well as the state of journalism in New York. It's a pretty comprehensive profile about Hamilton, with him willingly telling his story, and gets his friends and ex-colleagues to talk as well; it seems that he has kept his friendships for decades.

While the documentary goes in chronological order, in between the anecdotes are a selection of his shots taken during that time to show the evolution of Hamilton's subjects and photography skills. His reporter colleagues marvelled at his ability to take pictures that encapsulated what they were grappling how to write in their stories. One of those reporters became his wife.

And because he was so experienced, he seemed cool as a cucumber looking for the shot; with celebrities Hamilton would only be given 15 minutes to shoot them and so he worked very fast.

In the earlier years, he reminisced about meeting Alfred Hitchcock and his wife in their hotel room in New York. Hamilton just knocked on their hotel room door and spent the afternoon with them; one of the pictures he took was of Hitchcock sitting in a chair by a desk and laughing -- an image of him that he did not usually present to the media. 

Director Ang Lee with Michelle Yeoh in 2000

While he took pictures of celebrities, he also did photo journalism, about young women who were prostitutes and drug addicts, and also had overseas assignments, covering the war and famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, and was even in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.

Sitting next to him recalling the story, his reporter friend says Hamilton should have gotten a Pulitzer because they managed to sneak into a mortuary and Hamilton shot pictures of bodies in body bags, and indeed some shots in the film show bloodied faces. Like other photographers there at the time, they snuck the film out through diplomatic channels.

Another aspect of him is his love of movies, and some directors actually had Hamilton in their films as an extra. Sometimes he was just standing there, or he was pretending to be a photographer, like in Wes Anderson's The Tenenbaums. Hamilton was in the films while also shooting the movie stills for the media to use.

Throughout his 40-year career, Hamilton has shot millions of pictures, and while he has them all labelled in see-through storage boxes that are labelled, they are all in a storage unit; some were compiled in a book, but then what?

Jack Nicholson with a newspaper article of him

Uncropped was so inspiring to watch that I went home and found my digital camera and charged up the dead battery and shot pictures again. Street photography isn't easy, but it's all about timing and practice. Today Hamilton wanders around with a small digital camera and randomly takes pictures -- not even looking to see what he's taking because he knows he's got it.

As Hamilton's career ends around 2010 these journalists in their 70s mourn the demise of media, how the number of publications has shrunk as well as how freelancers are offered ridiculous word rates of 10 cents a word, and how people depend on social media for their news and not news outlets.

They were really lucky to be given opportunities to shoot or write pretty much whatever they wanted, which is why they are so passionate about what they do and remember those days so vividly.

Uncropped

Directed by D.W. Young

Starring James Hamilton

111 minutes

2023

VIFF Review: Modernism, Inc.

Noyes was most influential with his design work at IBM

Eliot Noyes was an American architect and industrial designer who promoted the importance of branding for a company, and how form and function were critical. "We think good design is good business," he used to say, and he proved it with his work for such clients as IBM and Mobil.

The documentary Modernism, Inc. profiles Noyes, as for most people who are not in the design world probably have never heard of him.

Noyes was very prolific. At the age of 29 he was already the director of the Industrial Design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One exhibition he showed the chair of the 19th century, stripping it to show off how much extraneous material these chairs had, from stuffing to fabric, and cushioning. He contrasted it with modern chairs that had simple lines and bright colours.

His design of the IBM Selectric typewriter

He was also very clever. During World War II Noyes set up a program to look into the potential uses of gliders, but the generals didn't seem interested in these planes that had no fire power. Then he noticed all the secretaries would read a military-themed comic strip in the newspaper everyday and sent a letter to the cartoonist about adding a storyline about gliders.

Soon after these comic strips were published, the generals took an interest in what Noyes was doing.

Noyes married another architect though she never practiced, and they moved their family to New Cannan, Connecticut. There he designed their home which had floor-to-ceiling windows with a courtyard in the middle; it meant that if they wanted to move from one room to another they would have to go outside, but the children in the film said this never bothered them.

The children were also brought up in a traditional sense, learning classical music and reading books, playing in nature.

Meanwhile a pilot Noyes knew in the air force was Thomas J Watson Jr, the son of the founder of International Business Machines, or IBM. As Watson Jr was poised to take over his father's business that started in 1911, Noyes advised him on creating a new standard look of the company, from the letterhead to the look of the products and even the architecture of the IBM buildings.

The Noyes' home in New Cannan

For this he got such designers as Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and architects like Mies van de Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Marco Zanuso to work with IBM.

Noyes' most famous design for the company was the IBM Selectric typewriter, which used a typeball instead of a "basket" of individual keys, while the design of the typewriter itself was sleek and modern. He realised that with computers, the parts that people don't need to understand how they work don't need to be seen; only design how it needs to be used.

Modernism, Inc. takes a sharp turn that led to Noyes' fall from the pedestal, but for his children, it was an opportunity to get to know their father better as a person, which son Eli says in the film [he died in March 2024 at the age of 81]. 

He recalls flying in -- what else -- gliders with his dad and they had a great time, but soon after that his father had cancer and died.

Nevertheless, Noyes is perhaps the father of branding in the United States, giving us the language and template to follow that have been tried and tested. Apple, the film points out, has followed Noyes' philosophy of form and function. 

Modernism, Inc.

Directed by Jason Cohn

79 minutes

2023

VIFF Review: Democracy Noir

Orban's power has been unchecked for the past 14 years

If you want to study the disintegration of democracy in Europe, Hungary is the place to be.

Since 2010, Victor Orban and his political party Fidesz has been in power. In the 2018 election Fidesz won a two-third majority, giving it the mandate to change the constitution.

Led by Orban, Fidesz dismantled rule of law, took control of publicly-funded media, and forced workers to work overtime without extra pay.

Orban confronted by sharp whistling by Szabo

This is what Democracy Noir is about, exposing how Orban fundamentally changed Hungary and how three women are trying to push back.

The documentary is directed by Connie Field, an American who lives in Berkeley, California, but her husband is Hungarian.

After the screening she explained that she has been going to Hungary every year since 2010 and it was in 2014 that she started filming what was going on; she could not get interest in her project at the time so she kept filming and only now the film has been released.

Field follows three women trying to stop Orban in their own ways: Timea Szabo an opposition politician; Nikoletta Antal, a nurse and activist; and Babett Oroszi, a journalist.

Szabo speaks fluent English and explains a lot of what is going on in English, while the other two speak Hungarian. 

When I asked her why she chose three women in the film, instead of say a mix of men and women, Field didn't have an answer... she seemed to think it was not important. But in the film, the three are very fierce and determined. There is a scene where Orban announces families won't have to pay income tax forever if they have four children, which echoes what China is trying to do without success. 

Antal is a nurse who demonstrates regularly

But apparently this policy has resulted in people willing to have kids because the state will help them pay for them, and in this regard are Orban supporters.

Like Donald Trump, Orban creates enemies of the state, and it is the LGBTQ+ community, and falsely accusing politician Szabo of being a drug dealer, as she has worked in Afghanistan and at Harvard.

Oroszi explains the rampant corruption that is happening in Hungary. The European Union poured a lot of money into Hungary to bring it up to developed country standards. However, Orban didn't use the money to improve healthcare, education and so on, but instead spent it on pet projects like a big, shiny stadium next to his country home, a rundown cottage to show his humble roots.

The contractors chosen in the bids were friends of Orban's; the bricks or stones used to build these big construction projects came from the quarries owned by Orban's father. Orban's father is building a massive complex of his own, while nurse Antal says she spent some of her own money to buy medicine for her patients who couldn't afford it.

Field was at tonight's VIFF screening

The media is completely gutted so that the vast majority are controlled by the government and they all use the same wording in their reports, while alternative media like the one Oroszi works for are few and far between; she says it's like musical chairs working for these few places that are left.

While opposition politician Szabo does well in Budapest, her party is unable to get votes in the countryside; Field explains after the screening that Orban looked to the rural areas to get votes and tailored his platform to what they wanted to hear. Sound familiar with Trump?

She says in fact Project 2025 has ideas borrowed from Orban which makes Democracy Noir required viewing not only in the United States but around the world.

What happened in Hungary also mirrors what has happened in Hong Kong, though Field notes that Orban isn't like Putin who feels the need to jail and poison opposition; Orban is so comfortable in his power that he knows he will win regardless and so opposing voices don't bother him.

And like Hong Kong, a lot of young people have left Hungary to work elsewhere in western Europe. When it's voting day and they need to go to the Hungarian consulate to cast their ballot, strangely the consulate is closed...

Democracy Noir

Directed by Connie Field

90 minutes