FOOD

Sidebar

OF THE WEEK

d LOST + FOUND CAFÉ in Vancouver is looking for a new direction.

The Downtown Eastside coffee shop founded by traveller, photographer, and philanthropist Kane Ryan has been listed for sale.

Lost + Found has been operating for almost nine years at 33 West Hastings Street. As chronicled by cafeyvr.com, the coffee shop and gallery space opened on January 28, 2013. Lost + Found is on the ground floor of the Chelsea Inn building.

On its website, Lost + Found notes that the location “attracts locals and tourists, painters and writers, photographers and... anyone looking to get lost in a comfy corner of the vast, bohemian space”.

The sale is being handled by realtor Jean Seguin’s Restaurant Business Broker agency. The listing notes that the 3,900-square-foot café near Gastown provides a “great opportunity for a nightclub or a pub”.

The business is listed for $49,500. g by Carlito Pablo

FOOD New-look Raja menu pleases vegetarians

by Charlie Smith

One of Vancouver’s oldest Indian restaurants is also one of the most contemporary.

Raga (1177 West Broadway) underwent a makeover during the pandemic, with newly upholstered furniture complementing a more chic interior.

The owner of the 40-year-old establishment, Raj Sharma, has also added an extensive selection of vegetarian specialties to the menu in response to consumer demand.

“I don’t know if it’s trendy or for health, but they’re asking for it,” Sharma told the Straight during a recent visit.

The revised Raga menu includes two eggplant and eight paneer entrées, as well as three curries with potatoes. That’s in addition to standard vegetarian classics such as saag paneer and bhindi masala, along with other dishes.

Sharma said that after including desserts and naan, there are about 30 vegetarian offerings on Raga’s menu.

The meals in some Indian restaurants can be jarringly spiced and heavy in the gut, but not at Raga, where the cooking is subtle: the dishes are skillfully flavoured and exceptionally low on grease, and you won’t leave the room with your mouth on fire.

That was apparent during my visit, when I enjoyed a sumptuous feast. The Raga Vegetarian Bhojan ($20.95) featured black dal and two vegetable curries, along with pulao rice, raita, fresh naan, and dessert.

If you’re starving, vegetarian, and in need of a good, warm dinner on a rainy night, this will do the trick.

For centuries, the soul of Indian cuisine has been vegetarian. Sharma pointed out that even nonvegetarians in his home country often eat meat only on weekends or special occasions.

But in recent years, the popularity of butter chicken and tandoori chicken has created a misleading impression in the West that Indian cooking is all about the meat, when it’s not. It’s the opposite, actually. g

The venerable Raja revamped its menu along with the decor recently, adding vegetarian dishes such as the Bhojan feast (above), featuring black dal, vegetable curries, rice, naan, and dessert.

FRESH BETWEEN TWO BUNS

E FRESH LOCALLY SOURCED INGREDIENTS SH LOCALLY SOURCED INGREDIENTSFR FR

fresh st. market • vancouver house • 1423 Continental St. 1423 Continental St. take out or dine-in • Open Everyday 11am-6pm

CHUTZPAH! FEST Comedian tells hilarious stories without lecturing

Former Vancouverite Ophira Eisenberg made it big in New York City and credits her outsider status

by Charlie Smith

It’s a long way from Vancouver to New York. Or so it must seem for anyone hoping to make it big in what’s considered to be the media capital of the world.

But one former Vancouver resident, Ophira Eisenberg, managed to cross this great distance, now making her home in Brooklyn as a successful standup comedian, author, actor, NPR radio host, and professional storyteller. New York Magazine even included her on its list of the “Top 10 comics that funny people find funny”.

In a phone interview with the Straight, Eisenberg recalled living for a brief time with a boyfriend near English Bay in the mid 1990s. She also had a place for a while on the East Side, “which was somewhat undesirable at the time”. In those days, she wasn’t even being invited to the local comedy festival.

Eisenberg was no trust-fund kid, so how did a child born in Calgary and educated in Montreal manage to settle in New York and get her own comedy and trivia radio show in 2012 that airs on more than 400 stations?

“I guess practise, practise, practise,” Eisenberg replied. “You know, just by a lot of work. It’s a lot of work.”

She said that she was living in Toronto 21 years ago when she travelled to 92nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to do a standup-comedy show. Following her performance and shows by two other comedians, there was a panel discussion with four Canadians who’ve enjoyed monumental success in American comedy. Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels had gathered there to answer this question: why are Canadians so funny?

“They were talking about Timbits: ‘That’s what makes Canadians so funny— the fact that they made a donut hole into a desirable product that people want to buy,’” Eisenberg recalled with amusement.

Not long afterward, she moved to New York, not knowing if she could afford to stay in the country. She now believes that what helped her as a Canadian in those days was having an “outsider perspective”. She was familiar with U.S. pop culture and much of its media but she could still view it through a “critically objective lens”.

This enabled her “to make fun of it to a certain degree because you’re not inside of it”.

This month, Eisenberg will share stories from her life in her first appearance at Vancouver’s Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts. “I feel like, in a weird way, it’s a homecoming, yet it’s also going to be new,” she said. STORYTELLING COMES very naturally to Eisenberg, whose autobiographical account of her life is called Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy. Sure, she sometimes had rotten taste in men, but with enough work, she overcame that to become a married mother “at an advanced age, as they say so eloquently in the medical industry”.

She’s also been a storyteller on The Moth Radio Hour. It’s a division of a New York–based organization called The Moth, which has been promoting storytelling since the late 1990s.

Eisenberg said that although there is sometimes an anecdotal story within a standup-comedy routine, what the Moth does is very different. She has gravitated to telling stories with literary arcs in which a person is up against something, either small or large.

“You are changed as a person, to some extent, by the end of the story,” Eisenberg explained.

She added that in true storytelling events, like the ones supported by The Moth, the audience has different expectations. They don’t come looking for comedians to offer up bite-sized items that elicit a big reaction and then move on to the next observation. The storyteller takes audience members on a journey, sometimes challenging them to be “the best version of themselves”.

“It’s fun,” Eisenberg stated. “I also like playing with audience tone and dynamics.”

Her stories draw from her personal experiences, which include two battles with cancer and incorporate the harrowing and, in hindsight, sometimes hilarious aspects of her journey.

“I say ‘hilarious’ because I can stand in front of you and tell these stories,” she noted, “so you know by that virtue that it’s kind of worked out with a happy ending.”

Eisenberg also enjoys sharing stories of some of her wild experiences as a kind of naive and innocent Canadian moving to New York. Sometimes she offers up lessons she’s learned from past heartbreaks, like when she tried to have “the best New Year’s Eve ever and having it fall apart so magnificently”.

“It’s like a TED talk but without that lecture feeling,” Eisenberg quipped. “This is a true personal story. There’s no specific call to action or takeaway.”

OVER THE YEARS, Eisenberg has appeared on Comedy Central, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and on HBO’s Girls. She has also been invited to the New Yorker Festival and created a comedy special.

So has there been any guest on Eisenberg’s radio show who has changed her life in any way? Without hesitating, she mentioned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

The musician was on her program a few months ago to talk about a project that he was working on when the conversation turned to professional success. Ma told her that the key is to overcome the lack of curiosity that can sink in over time.

“He was calling it a ‘beginner’s mind’— getting to a certain point in your life where maybe you have some professional success or you feel like at a certain age you have experience and expertise at a whole bunch of things,” Eisenberg said, “and what it is to try to get yourself back to that initial place of curiosity and wanting to learn and feeling the newness. To basically invigorate your next passion. Or the next thing that you are going to pursue.”

In discussing her own eclectic career path, Eisenberg brought up an old phrase once used by a critic of William Shakespeare when the Bard switched from being an actor to a playwright: “jack of all trades, master of none”.

“We usually don’t add the real, true end of that quote, which is ‘jack of all trades, master of none, which is better than being a master of one’,” she said.

“Why can’t I be that person who picks one thing and just focuses really hard on that?” Eisenberg said. “But that’s never been who I am.” g

Ophira Eisenberg is not only a standup comedian but also a storyteller, actor, author, and a very successful radio host. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.

They were talking about Timbits: ‘That’s what makes Canadians so funny...’

– Comedian Ophira Eisenberg

The Chutzpah Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts presents Ophira Eisenberg at 7 p.m. on November 10 at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre.