Even those familiar with the food court in Metrotown might have missed a place called “Cultures”. In fact, the best description I can find of it online is a page offering a franchise.
The place basically does sandwiches and salads (in the potato salad, coleslaw, pasta salad vein). There are some other wraps and lasagna and stuff that I haven’t tried. I have been going there for a while out of fast food fatigue: it’s all tasty and different than the usual mall faire. They have a sandwich and two salads combo: I usually get a tuna sandwich, potato salad, and some pasta salad. It’s like having a little personal picnic in the middle of the mall.
But, I’m not blogging to praise their food: it’s good, but not worth blogging about.
The place is run by a Chinese family (or they seem like they might be a family). As far as I can tell, between the group of them, they speak the following English: “sandwich”, “tuna”, “white bread”, “brown bread”, “toasted”, “mustard”, “mayonnaise”, “drink”, and the various numeric/money/change-making vocabulary. Even at that, about half the time, somebody other than the first person that addresses me has to be summoned to deal with complicated things like “tuna”.
I’m also not blogging to point out that there are some people in Vancouver who don’t speak much English. Nobody who has adopted the city as their home would be bothered by that.
I’m blogging to point out that there is pretty much no such thing as Chinese people (who are from China, with Chinese tastes in food) who like potato salad and pasta salad and beet salad and whatever other salad they serve. That means that every morning, these people wake up, follow some recipe that they got with the franchise, and think “I can’t believe white people eat this. It would be so much better with MSG and some kind of dried fish flakes or something.”
I’m blogging to praise their entrepreneurial spirit. Anybody can sell a product they like. It takes some real stones to sell a product that you probably are at best indifferent towards. I couldn’t do it.
So, go to Cultures when you’re at Metrotown. Get a sandwich and marvel at their courage.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:31 am
If this is like the Cultures that *used* to be in the Peterborough mall, they also have very tasty milk shakes.